As a bit of a tangent point to all of this: I've never felt particularly rewarded for killing things with no gold for quest rewards and little-to-no loot off of any monsters.
Indeed, I also don't think it makes any sense that stealing anything and everything your characters can access is a good answer, because some people, myself included, do not enjoy stealing and it breaks my immersion to run around someone's house while they don't stop me and take everything not nailed down.
Now if it were -difficult- to steal from people (they follow you around if they notice you etc), I think we'd be able to reconcile the loot-everything types getting more by saying they've invested skillpoints into making wealth, whereas the people who don't wish to steal still get their increased loot and gold from mobs/quests and they also get whatever combat effectiveness, talking bonuses,etc that they chose instead.
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I guess what I'm after, briefly, is some sort of combat-to-wealth reliable conversions, be it dropped gold from enemies or dropped weapons and armor with some frequency (that is less effective than store-bought or crafted but not significantly) so I don't feel like I'm just scraping by with my wealth.
I want the tactics to be "what abilities do I use when" far more than "what abilities can I possibly afford if I am to upgrade my weapons too?"
