So this was more data than I had dreamed of and it's been great fun looking at it. I decided to tackle the low-hanging fruit first, and that is skills. I've included some excerpt tables, but posted them at the bottom of the post to try to make things a little easier on our screen reader users (the tables aren't friendly for that I think).
Most popular by ranks (Table 1): The top six skills by rank are stealth, medical, melee combat, dodge, armor use, and perception. This probably shouldn't come as a surprise, physickers have been outed as the most popular class by far for a while, and everything else is combat or combat adjacent.
Most popular by points (Table 2): The top six skills by points are medical, stealth, arcana, melee combat, dodge, and bushcraft. The comparison is very interesting because this category shows depth of investment, rather than breadth. Medical was expected, stealth, melee combat, and dodge were all expected, but arcana and bushcraft are both delightful surprises to me, especially since arcana is not very fleshed out yet. Clearly people are excited about arcana.
Ordered by the ratio of points to ranks (Tables 3 and 4): So here is where the fun starts in my opinion. At the top of the table we have lapidary, medical, construction... wait, lapidary? Hang on there, we have to just address that first: lapidary doesn't do anything yet (I think). I very briefly tried to find where I could train it and came up blank, so this is
maybe test characters of our lovely dev. Hi Rias! Alright, that brief outing aside, at the top of the table we have medical, construction, metalworking, animal husbandry, riding, and druidry while at the bottom of the table we have two distinct groups: trading, music, and linguistics (not fully implemented), and metallurgy, shield use, leatherworking, and pottery. Medical makes sense, physickers are the most common class specialization by count, level, and XP, that means that people make physickers, and they level up their physickers, and they dump at least some of those points into advanced ranks in medical despite there not being a lot of incentive to do so. Construction, metalworking, and animal husbandry all make sense, those are skills that have mechanically coded benefits for heavier skill investment (lots of recipes, desirable recipes that have high skill requirements, and for animal husbandry that juicy, juicy land allotment (plus access to different animals I think?)). Druidry is a delightful surprise, but probably shouldn't have been. It's interesting, has some neat lore and questing to do, and does offer perks for very high skill (longer duration and added effects for some abilities). Riding is a surprise, and I suspect a fluke from a small number of high-level players that have been planning on riding in their builds, but I could easily be wrong there. We see that stealth isn't near the top of the table any more, which means most of those stealth ranks are spread out across a LOT of characters - that makes sense, it's a fun skill to have even if you only have a little.
The skills at the bottom of the table (that are implemented) also make some sense. Metallurgy and shield use are secondary or helper skills and insofar as I know, metallurgy doesn't reward deep investment. Pottery and leatherworking are interesting cases. On the up side, pottery has been around for quite a while, it's very inexpensive to get started in (you only need a shovel and a bucket and for mass production maybe your own table or handcart) and it makes useful things. On the down side, it doesn't have a lot of recipes and only one requires advanced ranks to produce and that item can be bought directly from stores, and nothing it produces can be worn or used in combat (aside from sling bullets that can be purchased directly or crafted with two other skills). It has not seen a lot of investment though, and the difference between points and ranks is only 75, which suggest that no character in the game can produce the one high-skill recipe. Leatherworking on the other hand was difficult to raise for a long time, but that got modified at the same time as tailoring. It doesn't lack for recipes, or steep skill requirements on those recipes. It is currently the only way to produce armor, a highly sought after good. Given all that, why doesn't it see the same kind of investment as say metal working or tailoring (which got improved at the same time, and for reference has a point-to-rank ratio of 1.53 compared to leatherworking's 1.08)? I suspect it might be the depth of skill investment required to gather hides compared to wool or ore. To collect hides, one needs stealth, tracking, perception, ranged (or melee) combat, and skinning, while collecting ore only requires mining and wool only requires animal husbandry. I suspect leatherworking will eventually see more investment, especially as players have been making hides more available at market, but I hypothesize people have held off either because of lack of available materials in the market or the relatively higher skill cost of controlling the production process from start to finish. That's just my guess though, and it's been fun looking at the data and thinking about it.
Ratio of ranks to goals (no table): I looked at this briefly and gave up on it fairly quickly after seeing weaving at 1.32 - of the planned 2100 ranks, 2785 have been attained. Hmm. Yeah that could be because it's been around for a while and not everyone uses the goals command to plan their stuff. Not much use in looking at the goals in ratios then. I basically stopped looking at goals data there, but looking at the skills ordered by goals is still interesting (combat and exploration at the top, some lesser used or secondary crafts at the bottom).
Other measures (also no table): I've been looking at the table and poking around with the numbers to see if anything stands out. One of the things I looked at was a sort of advanced-rank-point ratio, where I take the difference between points and ranks giving us the
maximum number of ranks between 101-200. Pottery is the easy example, 833 points 758 ranks, 75 advanced ranks, max. Those 75 ranks all must fall between 101-200 because we'd need at least 101 advanced ranks for that to not be true, and so they cost 2 points each. Thus our ratio is 2 x (points - ranks) / points, or 0.18 for pottery. That is, 18% of invested skill points in pottery are advanced ranks, while 72% are from introductory (1-100) ranks. The ordering is identical to the points to ranks ratio, but this feels like it's telling us something more interesting because it has an actual interpretation. It doesn't hold well though, for example medical, construction, and metal working are all so heavily invested that they break this metric. Medical's ratio is 1.07... so 107% of invested points are in advanced ranks... no, no, obviously that's not true. It's easy enough to understand why it breaks, ranks above 200 cost 3 instead of 2 so the math has to change, but with most skills it's pretty impossible to determine how the points break out (and that's probably good, that potter (or potters) with pottery above 100 probably feels pretty seen. Sorry.). On the other hand, all you people that aspire to the best at something, look at the bottom of the table, there's lots of room for people to climb to the top from down there.
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Table 1 (ordered by ranks)
skills ranks goals points points/ranks ranks/goals
-------------- ------- ------- -------- -------------- -------------
Stealth 5653 17620 7471 1.322 0.3208
Medical 5628 8051 12085 2.147 0.699
Melee Combat 5379 21375 7062 1.313 0.2516
Dodge 5222 16995 6774 1.297 0.3073
Armor Use 4445 8810 5900 1.327 0.5045
Perception 4402 19420 5832 1.325 0.2267
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Table 2 (ordered by points)
skills ranks goals points points/ranks ranks/goals
-------------- ------- ------- -------- -------------- -------------
Medical 5628 8051 12085 2.147 0.699
Stealth 5653 17620 7471 1.322 0.3208
Arcana 4336 11683 7459 1.72 0.3711
Melee Combat 5379 21375 7062 1.313 0.2516
Dodge 5222 16995 6774 1.297 0.3073
Bushcraft 4089 5750 6216 1.52 0.7111
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Table 3 (ordered by points/ranks)
skills ranks goals points points/ranks ranks/goals
------------------ ------- ------- -------- -------------- -------------
Lapidary 494 450 1470 2.976 1.098
Medical 5628 8051 12085 2.147 0.699
Construction 1841 2500 3763 2.044 0.7364
Metalworking 2973 3500 6051 2.035 0.8494
Animal Husbandry 2942 4200 5817 1.977 0.7005
Riding 740 5400 1440 1.946 0.137
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Table 4 (ordered by points / ranks, the bottom of the table)
skills ranks goals points points/ranks ranks/goals
---------------- ------- ------- -------- -------------- -------------
Pottery 758 800 833 1.099 0.9475
Leatherworking 424 2500 458 1.08 0.1696
Shield Use 905 4100 975 1.077 0.2207
Metallurgy 748 2100 798 1.067 0.3562
Trading 145 3300 145 1 0.04394
Music 30 3200 30 1 0.009375
Linguistics 703 10000 703 1 0.0703
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Edit to add: Fun fact! There are 43,003 unspent skill points for the collective player base at the time of the data posting - about 108 per character on average.