I don't like them either. It just takes me out of the experience when, say, a character that in my head is good at persuasion fails every other persuasion check. Doesn't help that rerolls, for some reason, fail 8 times out of 10, even with 'easy' rolls (and sometimes they give the same bad number a few times on a row)
The thing is that in DnD you might still be good at it, but you are still talking to real people, and you might not hit the topic correctly etc.
I think a better compromise is to let us see the actual difficulty of a check BEFORE we choose. At the table a player can ask the DM, does it look like this guy is easy to convince? to get some idea of how difficult that particular check is.
