Well, i wouldn't have made a new topic if it had been old knowledge or obvious to me. Although i'm not at all surprised others have already encountered this bug before.
Do you know where to find articles/bug reports/threads where this feature has been mentioned/discussed? A few searches turned up nothing, so i'm probably missing the correct keywords.
Probably few have referred to exactly this bug before; searching for "uninitialized" (using advanced search to select the DF parts of the forum) brings a load of results, such as the post linking
the example I mentioned, but this thread is the only one discussing experience/skill from tools being uninitialized. As for reporting/discussing it, the
top of this board gives a quick introduction to reporting bugs (with that first link being a completed bug report you can use as example), and the top thread gives more depth. Once you make the issue, people will start linking it to any duplicates and confirming it, and chances are someone will point out the quick fix (which
should be modding in a skill for tools, but I don't know) as well. When you're done, might want to link it here so people using the forum search can find it easily.
Oh, and the reason I thought it aught to be obvious at this point was not because of your knowledge, Larix, but because of the discrepancy between the number of people who had read the thread versus the number of satisfying answers posted.