Looking at Basic has caused me to reevaluate my opinion of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
Previously, I had difficulty running LotFP. partially because I hadn't taken the sheer lethality of Basic and clones into account.
I also felt that the skills were limiting and that characters were so unskilled that they could do very little. But I now think that I was missing something which cause it to seem that way.
Flame Princess offers only a handful of skills, as opposed to dozens, and I didn't see how they were supposed to apply to the variety of situatiosn I was accustomed to using skills for.
But it turns out that the selection of skills is simply a way to unify racial abilities, theif-skills and common dungeoneering actions into a single mechanic.
This helps to make the character sheet shorter. I get it now.