Hey Mark,
here are some thoughts on your points.
Regarding passive skillgain: We didnt implement that on purpose. Like mentioned above passiv skillgain calls for exploitation. Back in the day when playing Ultima Online people always equipped cursed weapons lowering their stats so they’d have a bigger chance of passively gaining skillpoints.
Its similar with gainable traits by special actions. People will tend to minmax their play according to these actions. For example they’ll “feed” all orc kills to one guy just to unlock the trait.
Neverthelss gainable traits are on our discussion list. We will probably start with the injury system related traits (one eyed, scarred, lost ear etc) and see where we go from there.
Cheers