I have reached the conclusion that having multiple default skill levels is not desirable in my Fudge games. I had formerly believed that the standard default skill level of Poor (and skill difficulty of Average) was fine for free-form games and creating characters on the fly (with certain exceptions), but I now think it's best for detail-oriented games as well.
The use of multiple default skill levels not only creates unnecessary complexity, it establishes an objective perception of skill difficulty that is frankly unrealistic. The difficulty (or ease) of mastering a skill is relative to the person undertaking its mastery. It is, in a word, subjective. What is easy for one person is hard for another, and the only logical way of reflecting this fact without resorting to mind-boggling complexity is to give all skills the same default level: Poor. A character's natural inclinations, meanwhile, are evident in those skills in which the character excels (namely, by choosing to assign levels to them during character creation or development).
The only other default skill level I would retain would be Nonexistent for those skills that are clearly beyond any possibility of practicing without prior training or research due to their esoteric (and possibly supernormal) nature. For the sake of simplicity, I would make the starting level of all such skills Terrible. Even skills that might be considered mundane in their natural environment (where their default level is Poor) could be exotic and incomprehensible to the denizens of another environment (where their default level would be Nonexistent).
This is a case where simplicity does the best job of simulating reality. Now I need to decide whether to revise my Optimum Skills for Fudge page [Edit: see Ultimate List of Skills instead] to reflect this epiphany... [Edit: I did.]
[Originally posted in Fudgery.net/fudgerylog on 16 March 2011.]
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