I have some thoughts about the skill system as well:
At the moment there seems to be very little rewards baseline for actually grinding out skills: the active mini-games do not become more rewarding or noticeably less difficult. And the instant-solve is sitting at far too low a percentage to be comfortably successful even at Rank 10 unless you swap to the "no mini-games" mode, which still feels incredibly ponderous because without the 10x combo multiplier for xp, you're waiting an awful long time between upgrades. At the moment I feel as though the most comfortable approach is to start the game with mini-games so that you can grind out moderately high skill ranks and then turn them off, which doesn't sit particularly right with me, but it's not overly difficult to get rank 10 in skills and for the mini-games to then be essentially pointless.
The easiest solution I can see to this would be to just squish the systems together, get the benefits of a high exp multiplier for completing the mini-games early on, whilst allowing for more or less auto-completion once you're at the high ranks.
Alternatively, having skill ranks determine the type of mini-game you do more actively, such as eliminating the popup inputs (like the Alexis dance event) for high ranks, could also be useful.
Lastly, having reward output such as friendship/attraction etc. be given a multiplier based off of your ranks.