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You've moved the goal posts a bit but you have exactly the same problem that I've mentioned before. You've either made the answers so reliable that you can count on them (90% in your example) or you leave them unreliable enough that you can only count on your normal percent chance of success.
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Reliable in what way? If most of the time you don't know, you're no better than if you haven't attempted any Empathy roll. You don't get anything out of it. Count on what to do what exactly? That you don't know? How can you mix knowledge with absence of knowledge?
And beside that you have 20% vs 10% of right and wrong answers. 2/3 to 1/3. And it's still a gamble.
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For example, if 8 or less is ~16%, 8-14 would be ~68%, 15+ 16%, then a simple +1 would change that to: 9- ~26%, 10-15 ~69%, 16+ ~5% which already reduces your misleading chances to very low. A +3 (basically where Sensitive -> full Empathy) gives you a 50% chance of success with critical failures less than half a percent of the time.
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Critical failure was a basic idea but it is too small a chance, yes. Need to use margin of failure then.
You've got to understand what I'm trying to achieve here. I want the whole of Sensitive advantage to be useful at least slightly at IQ 10 without further modifications. You see I may have 10 IQ and take Intuition and it will be useful, I would get more out of it if my IQ was higher but is still useful. All because of uncertainty results on usual failure. I dare you to find another advantage among those in Basic Set that you would not want to use at average attributes, hell even less than average attributes.
If you have 10 DX for example you would get a benefit from taking... I don't know... Brawling skill. Even if you had like 8-9 DX you would still benefit. Of course you are no big deal fighter but you would stand a slightly better chance of defending yourself, if need be.
With Sensitive and IQ 10... if only problem stopped at it being not useful. If only that... But getting reliably wrong results, misleading results 80% of the time... You ask GM if this person is lying and he tells you "no he's not lying" and you know that you are wrong 80% of the time... What would you, yes you specifically, do as a player in that situation? I don't need empathy to know that you're lying if you say "Well, I will act according to what GM said and not the opposite". That is why "no answer" and a little bit of misleading answers is the way to remedy this. Because that's how you create uncertainty and still make the ability a little bit useful.
Also 50-50 case. For some reason you think that first 50% are useful to you. But where is the success? You have no way of knowing if you are TRULY correct. GM rolls secretly, he doesn't tell you. You outsource your coin flipping to him. And then you act as if you would act without the whole Empathy thing. If you're a smart player you'll just ignore it because you will see how inconsequential it is. Unless you as a player want your agency taken away from you (like in the case of compulsion and whatnot) and act accordingly to this inconsequential coin toss.
I agree that math behind my idea needs some work (critical failure too low a chance). But the idea still stands.
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2) Most things are, not just attacks. That's why Campaigns pretty well outlines that unless you're destroying the subject, you can try again. If you build something wrong, you can build it again. If you draw something wrong, you can draw it again. If you do a bad job making supper, you can make something else. If you clean something poorly, you can keep cleaning.
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If a failure causes no damage, let
them try again after a reasonable time,
but at -1 per repeated attempt – that is,
-1 on the second attempt, -2 on the
third, and so on – until they succeed or
give up.
Have you read this? And no, repeated attempts are not the norm for that task. It's not the same as making another go at cooking supper. What you get for repeated attempts at Empathy realistically is confusion. Since Empathy is not based on fact. It's just a feeling. Why did you have the feeling that this person is lying before and why do you have the opposite feeling now? And which one you should believe now? What to make of it?
If you know a good way how to deal with these problems I presented, better than mine. Well, let me know.
P.S. Don't forget that knowing in your heart of hearts that someone is lying is not the end of the story. It's not such a big advantage. Well you know that this suspect is lying and let's suppose you know for sure. You have to prove it. Imagine telling a fellow police officer "He's lying, I just know it" or "Release this suspect, it's not him. I just feel it".