I'm not even mad at Bethesda for dumbing down the skill system the way they did.
A full fledged one is clearly too much for them to handle, so simplifying it down to perks you buy based on your SPECIAL stats is actually genius.
And since they insist, it certainly meshes a lot better with FPS style gameplay too.
Problem is, they did nothing fun or interesting with it.
They went back to the Fallout 3 design of boring perks, and learned nothing from New Vegas' approach.
It was essentially required because of the dumbfuck design. 7 attributes with 10 perks each means they can only put 70 perks in the game, so they made everything have ranks. It's hard to do the interesting bespoke perk design of New Vegas when you then have to design a second or third or fourth rank to it. That means goodbye to Meltdown, Jury Rigging, Long Haul, Silent Running, Light Step, Paralyzing Palm, etc.
You're right that doing 10 perks doesn't help; an uneven distribution would make far more sense.
But even if you take a ranked approach, there's no need to get rid of them all.
What I think they should've done a lot of was lock basic gameplay things behind these perks, with the perks not only unlocking them, but powering them up to almost cheating levels.
Consider if perception had an opening ranked perk like follows:
Firearm Handling I (Pe 1) - Boost to firearm damage, and allows you to aim with iron-sights and scopes.
Firearm Handling II (Pe 3) - Boost to firearm damage, faster reloading speed, and allows reloading on the run.
Firearm Handling III (Pe 6) - Boost to firearm damage, and allows dual-wielding of pistols.
Firearm Handling IV (Pe 10) - Boost to firearm damage, allows you to trigger a bullet time at will that will drain your AP.
And agility had a lockpick series like this:
Lockpicking I (Ag 1) - Allows you to pick locks, period.
Lockpicking II (Ag 4)- Makes lockpicking easier, and allows you to force locks open (or fail and jam them), or breach them with controlled explosives
Lockpicking III (Ag 7) - Makes lockpicking easier, and allows you to set up proximity booby traps on containers and doors.
Lockpicking IV (Ag 9) - Makes lockpicking easier, and allows you to replace the locks on doors, and lock them - idea being that you can block enemy routes, and/or cheese them.
I came up with these in about 10 minutes, if Bethesda had the gumpton to attempt anything of the sort, the system would be significantly more interesting.