Combat- Why not contests of skills?

[S41NT]

But otherwise, yeah, I understand where you are coming from. I've gotten to the point where I'm convinced that the official way works pretty well, but it just seems inelegant.

Works very well, but you have to use it to its full power. The defenses are lower because they are absolute values. If your dodge is 10 then you dodge at 10 no matter how good the attack was. And that's why you have to feint. When I started with GURPS, the GM didn't tell us anything about feints. But it was ok, because the skill levels were low and we had a hard time parrying and dodging. In a high level game, you could never neglect feints. Combats would take forever!