Why are skill points still in the game?

I don't see the reason behind having skill points in the game anymore. They essentially limit the number of skills a character can have to *roughly* 40 (20-25 missions along with 1 skill point per level). Now each profession has an average of 75 skills. So each character can potentially learn 150 skills, and only choosing 40 is somewhat limiting, especially since you need to unlock skills to make PvP characters.

Are skill points an obsolete feature? Back in the E3 for everyone event, you could buy every skill under the sun from a skill trader at a very cheap price, so obviously back then they needed something to prevent players from learning every skill available to their character from one visit to the skill trainer.

But now that skill trainers only have a certain selection of skills, as well as the increasing cost of skills (everytime you buy a skill, the next skill will cost +10gp more).

When you're leveling up your character, you're doing alot of PvE and thus end up purchasing alot of skills that are great against monsters. When you reach level 20, you end up with a load of skills that are now useless in PvP.

I know that you can continue leveling after 20 and recieve 1 skill point everytime you fill up the bar, but its really slow now that you only get a handful of XP killing monsters and other players.

Ideally I'd like to see an option to redeem skills you already know for skills points, so that after you're done leveling you can throw away the PvE skills and turn your flame bot into something more useful.

skill points will stay

you can eventually wind up with every skill of all professions with the ability to change secondary professions

each mission has a secondary objective, which will reward you another skill point along with 1000xp. that's another 20-25 skill points right there. you can earn more skill points with fame in PvP, although that may be somewhat more limited. you can also gain skills through quests, so you can save your skill points for other skills.

you also earn a skill point every time you level past 20, but you still stay lvl 20.