At the very least, it's a much worse crime against the very foundations of the genre as it is to take stats away from the implementation of physical skills (i.e. combat) - as most mainstream RPGs tend to do these days - than it is to rely on the player's own intelligence to get him or her through important dialogue scenes etc.
Well that's most likely true.
But in KotC 2:
1) these skills won't be very important and
2) a character focusing on them wouldn't be as good in combat as the others.
See, if there's no non-combat gameplay then non-combat skills won't be missed much. That's the reason the missing skills don't matter much in KotC.
Otoh non-combat gameplay can be interesting. Example from Drakensang TRoT: Potions. You won't find many of those, actually you'll find very few, and if you'd buy them... they are very expensive. But there is a wilderness skill (to find the ingredients) and a plant harvesting skill plus an alchemy skill to brew potions. So you can use non-combat skills to gain an advantage in combat (having potions) or to make some easy coins (you won't be spammed with gold, and saving dukats so that you can afford this dwarven 2handed hammer might take quite some time). Also the crafting skills were really useful, because you had hardly any loot (at least not weapons) from enemies, so if you wanted good weapons asap, you needed someone with smithing and bowcraft etc.
Generally I liked the game (Drakensang TRoT) better than the first one, although walking speed was still too slow (but can be set manually by manipulating the savegames , which are sqlite dbs actually which strikes me as quite an efficient method for savegames, quick and reliable). Another improvement the game could very much use would be a possibility to zoom out into a fixed iso view a la Dragon Age (but unlike DA zoomed out enough to see what's going on).
Better stay focused. 