To clarify, I meant near endless progression with crafting/looting/buying. Perks will not be touched, but imaging finding a cooking pot that cooks 10% faster than the one you have already, same with most things in the game. Combine two items into a better one. Perma degradation and the only way to get ol faithful running again (A rare legendary gun not repaired with repair kits) is to find another one and combine them in the workbench. That kind of thing. Crafting skills might max out at 200-400? But what you get from 100 to 200 is more like what you get now going from 90-100, so increases get more granular later game. Still to me as a player that's incentive to keep playing, even if things have slowed down some.
Ah, so I need to think of crafting/looting/buying differently from the perks. That part sounds neat. Is Permanent degradation a thing for all equipment or just the rare/legendary item? That is, "Old Sod Buster" the legendary shovel can't be repaired via a repair kit, but any old shovel from Working Stiffs can be?
I like the Perks, so I'm into them sticking around. In A16 folks could use "points" to improve a LBD skill. I think it was like +10 to that skill. I never really thought that was an economical choice, but I'm curious if that's part of the plan? I guess it would be something like spending a point to improve your Vehicles knowledge by 10, or something. I'm not advocating for that one way or another; just curious if that's in the mix?
So, echoing back what I think I'm hearing so you can correct me if I don't get it:
You can find magazines and they would add to a skill like they do now. Then you can also perform certain actions and they too would add to a skill. So, perhaps if you're harvesting crops your ability to craft Seeds also increases, as if you had read a copy of Southern Farming (or whatever the magazine's title is.) If that's the right idea, then finding a good balance in the number of harvests equating to a magazine will be an interesting effort.
Crafting seeds is probably a horrible example as I'm not sure what taking that skill above and beyond the current max will get you, unless the game grows into there being some kind of seed quality system, but I'm not sure that would inspire anyone.
So, if I back up and kind of summarize:
Perks remain (though there could be adjustments needed)
Crafting skill currently measured by magazine counts becomes a hybrid value that can be improved in multiple ways.
Crafting skills will scale higher both to support legendary items and an item attribute improvement system, but also to perhaps give some room mathematically for whatever the ratio between magazines and actions needs to be.
Am I close?