I recall an old drama on the Interplay forums. Someone bought was Fallout, got all excited about exploring the post-apocalyptic world and made a character specializing in outdoorsmanship, barter, and stealth. Naturally, he didn't enjoy the experience. Was it the developers' fault for not ensuring that any randomly-picked skills would allow him to beat the game?
Yes? What kind of a question is that?
"Freedom" is not "freedom" anymore when you need to specialize in certain skills to be succesful.
Nonsense.
A character system that makes every build viable is entirely worthless.
If you do not need to think about your build, then there is no challenge in creating a build. No challenge = bad design.
Skill traps are part of that.
That doesn't mean those skills are entirely without use (if a skill is entirely useless, it should not be in a game, I guess we can all agree on that). But featuring a range from good to bad skills also allows players to set their own challenge level, once they become acquainted with the system. Without that, you wouldn't even need to become acquainted with the system.
And players that aren't acquainted with the system have a learning experience to look forward to - if you don't like that, what the hell are you playing games heavily relying on number crunching for?
In that example, the player was simply a fool for going in blindly, expecting a game that is about combat & dialogue to be solveable via stealth, trade and wilderness skills.
The need to think about metagame (what used to be RTFM, if you ask me) at least somewhat is essential for any real RPG enthusiast and essential for the experience - if you do not want that, read a book, watch a movie or play a walking simulator, but stop demaning (c)RPGs to feature braindead character building.
Thinking back, all the gaming experiences that I enjoyed (at leat those related to RPGs) were in games that required me to think about builds and allowed me to screw them up.
One of the reasons I remember my times with BG, Arcanum & Fallout fairly well, but frankly I remember very little about Pillars of Eternity is that in PoE no matter where you put your points, every build just works (sure, some are more optimal than others, but there's simply no real failure here). Of course that doesn't lead to anything memorable.
Not once when playing something like Arcanum did I think "What a bad game for allowing me to make a bad choice", instead I thought "I learned something. Next time I'll do better".
However, the skills in Fallout are at first a little like a promise. Not a promise that you can finish the game with them alone (otherwise you wouldn't have 3 tags), but the promise that there will be interesting role-playing opportunities for those skills. They are an interface for you, as the player, to interact with the world. So, having skills that are just dead ends that lead almost nowhere is just bad design. It is not creating an interesting challenge for the player to come up with ways to use them so as to make an effective character.
There ARE interesting role-playing opportunities for those skills (well, except the outdoor stuff, iirc). However, they are not all on the same level.
Which is something you learn over the course of multiple playthroughs (by far not all of them have to be complete, of course), or by doing some research.
As soon as you can randomly pick any abilities to focus on, and it would always work, the system becomes worthless and might as well be replaced by no system at all -> just pick how you want to solve quest X and it will succeed. That is essentially what you are asking for if you are asking for a system that does not allow bad builds.