>Yyyeaaah... no.
>
>Skill out to support your playstyle. There's no One True Build.
>About the only rule is that you usually don't want to bother going
>past yellow rank in any skill, because of diminishing returns.

I'm seconding the couch potato here. There's no skill good enough that it warrants going past the yellow ranks, because there's a significant opportunity cost to doing so. You're pretty much always going to be better off buying up three green ranks of a different skill than three red ranks of the same skill.

And the skills you buy should support your playstyle, including your ship choice. The skills that do things like boost subsystem power and exotic damage work best with science ships and, more importantly, certain science boff powers, for example. At the moment, my engineer who's flying a science ship doesn't have any torpedoes slotted (mostly because I goofed when picking up weapons from the exchange), so I dropped the tac boff's torpedo-boosting power in favor of powers that support the beams and cannons that are equipped. (It's not an endgame set-up, so I'm not stressed about it; she just hit 40, or RALH, in the middle of the mission I'm running as I type this, so I may be redoing her loadout soon, though.)

One very important tip: DO NOT BUY DRIVER COIL.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding