[warmachine]

I commend this kind of thinking but I think skill granularity is part of the GURPS gameplay philosophy. For example, a police procedural will have a number of investigators who have different methods of investigation, some scientific forensics, some mundane clue analysis, some face-to-face interviewing, some database research, some following the suspects etc. The Investigate skill stomps on too much of this difference whereas the natural science skills aren't that important. However, Investigate would be fine in, say, a space exploration where an investigator is just one of a broader team but the natural sciences are more commonly used. That is granularity and redundancy depends on the campaign.

That is, a universal list either has skills that are too granular in some campaigns or too coarse in others. Now, you could switch each individual super-skill on or off, depending on the campaign. There is another problem that the usefulness of a skill depends on the campaign. Natural Science could be essential in a Star Trek style exploration, useless in a political intrigue, or somewhere in between for, say, a frontier trading game. You could reduce the difficulty of super-skills by two steps for campaigns where the GM deems it not so useful but not useless.

I have taken a different approach in my house rules, emphasising usefulness. Depending on the campaign, the GM chooses amalgamations of less useful skills, making it cheaper to be proficient in a set of less useful skills.