This is just an idea we want feedback on. There are several decking skills (programming, cracking, systems), and they have coded uses, but each skill only has a few coded uses. A proposed idea for alleviating some of the pain around these skills having partial implementations is to discount the amount of UE these skills count towards the UE cap. You would still earn ue/spend ue the same on these skills, but if you put 1 point into programming, it would only count as 0.33ue toward the UE cap. The hope with this change would be to allow people to get these support skills and start using them, without impacting their overall gameplay too heavily, given the UE cap. Plenty of stuff would need to be figured out, but the question is: Do you think this is a positive change?
I agree with the premise that programming, cracking, and systems are too split up and thinly populated with mechanics to really be meaningful distinct skills, but I also think this is arguably true of other skills (explosives, forensics, munitions) and weighting how much a skill contributes towards the UE cap based on how useful it is at the time is a very messy and subjective road to go down that will probably end up with some really confusing issues to resolve in the future.
If it's felt that there is any skill that is unlikely to see much isolated development, my feeling it would be better to bite the bullet and depreciate it and move its checks to another skill and deal with the short term cleanup of characters that have skilled into it already, rather than the long term headache of gameplay skills being weighted differently in experience costs.