Most of this discourse feels like some kind of religious ritual built on the foundation of authority bias. Where is the evidence that skills improves performance over any other methodology outside of the fact of its nascent popularity?

I do agree with Jacques Ellul in Technological Society that technique precedes science, and that's certainly the case with LLMs; however, this whole industry waves off rigorous validation in favor of personal anecdotes ("it feels more productive to me!" "they didn't study after Opus 4.5 was released").

The difference I'm noticing is in that with a proper skill you can skip the process of LLM wandering about and trying to guess how to interact with an API or else.

so they basically just save you time, even if they are 50% efficient of what it COULD be