If I read you right, Fellgnome, you enjoy optimizing your characters for performance and would prefer that it was easier for you to do so without bothering with the roleplaying aspects of dialogue, especially because when your two characters argue, because you cannot guaranteed both get the action outcome you want AND the stat outcome you want - instead, the outcome will be chosen at random, biased in favour of the one of your characters that is best at arguing --- as if they were actual people arguing an issue rather than merely a mechanism for allocating you stat points to your preference while choosing an action.
You are entirely right that these things are not "minor RP flavour things", but I strongly disagree with your apparent assumption that they should be, rather than having significant impact.
I mean, this is a roleplaying game. It would be a crying shame if a system for dealing with character personality traits (however defined in the game), was merely "minor roleplaying flavour" rather than something meaningful that affected the player's behaviour. It is better for roleplaying games not to have anything reflecting personality traits than to have a system that merely provides minor flavour - if you want to play around with personalities, make it meaningful.
Ever since Ultima IV I've been strongly in favour of having both words and deeds influence stats in CRPGs rather than leaving everything up to the player to optimize stats as he saw fit while acting as he saw fit, with his actions and stats being effectively unrelated. Roleplaying, even in CRPGs, is to me not merely about building the stat-perfect killer (or trader, or whatever role you choose) to bulldoze through combat/trade/dialogue encounters, but about playing a role.
I do understand where you are coming from, however, as the very first CRPGs I played back in the 80's pretty much were build the most efficient party of killers games, with very, very, little actual roleplaying, and it remains a popular subset of the CRPG game genre to this very day. It was a fun thing to play at that time, and it remains so today.
It is just that I prefer CRPGs that don't reduce roleplaying to minor flavour that isn't supposed to get in the way of stat allocation, so the very thing that is a source of annoyance to you in this game is a source of joy to me.
