In D:OS, once we had the active skill abilities at level 5, we could learn an unlimited amount of them.
In D:OS EE, even at the max level the skill abilities had a limit to the number of skills we could learn.
The D:OS system was better, IMO. It was a middle ground between learning everything all the time and having only limited abilities:
* Someone who is just dabbling or using a few spare points in a given ability is limited.
* It requires a huge investment to master an ability, considering how the ones with active skills don't have any gear that increases them (in D:OS 1 at least)
* There is more freedom in making the skills if players can reach no limit. In D:OS EE, it's very silly that we are told we can learn 6 Novice water spells when the game has only 5 Novice water spells. Removing the limit at high levels would lessen this problem and give freedom for the designers to make as many or as few skills as they want.
* Many of the skills in D:OS EE are underwhelming, just like many of the highest level skills were in D:OS. In the original game, this wasn't much of an issue since you could just keep them around until the rare situation in which they would be useful, but in the Enhanced Edition this doesn't work - it's better to simply not ever learn the underwhelming skills, since they are going to take the space of something else. This becomes even worse, for the records, when a given ability doesn't have many useful skills in a given rank - rogues don't have two useful Master abilities, for example, but we can't use the Master slot to learn one more Disciple-level skill.
If this allowed characters to become too powerful in D:OS - which IMO it didn't, considering how this was something available to all roles (as opposed to, for example, only spells being unlimited) -, it could be balanced by tweaking the skills themselves.
But I think the skill system in the original version of D:OS was much, much better than in the EE.
