Wobbler said:
Jeffh, how would you like to handle multiple techteams working on different aspects/components of a new technology?
Combine all their specialities, effective skill level slightly higher than the best skill level of any individual team involved, experience split between them, and of course, you have to pay all their salaries.
That's just me, an amateur game designer and full-time grad student, musing about this one afternoon; I'm not paid to do this stuff. That does mean there could be further issues I'm overlooking, but it also means if I could come up with that answer more or less on the spur of the moment, Paradox, which from what I've seen so far has some crack designers, should be able to think up the same or better stuff with relative ease.
I think the new, more abstract, system will actually yield a better historical flavour than, say, having a nuclear physicist researching carrier doctrines because he's one's country's only high-skill tech team.
Okay, to some extent I agree. There are lots of ways to make that a bad idea, though. For one thing, you could make it extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that a team would ever pick up new specialities that didn't bear some obvious relationship to their starting ones, or make some teams (mostly those that represent one really smart guy and his grad students and hirelings rather than a corporate entity or university) "specialists" with a much lower effective skill level outside some fairly narrow field, if you don't think the existing speciality system already captures this well (and it seems to me that specialities are
far more relevant than skill levels in the existing system).
EDIT: Or you could just make sure there's always something attractive within his speciality for that physicist to do, of course.