Everything else can be learned on the job.
Basically yeah, but I think this is more about optimizing the points you have than going with as little as you could.
I still spend all my points, I just prefer to bring more supplies.
Yeah, but the points spent on skills easily makes the dwarves outproduce anything you can bring with those points. Specially since steel and such are so very expensive. Im not saying that embarking without skilled dwarves isnt fun (or
fun) and its more satisfactory when you build everything including skills yourself. Its not optimal though. Examples:
Good miners mine so much faster than without skills (including ore, gems, rooms, down to the magma you name it) that it will significantly stall you fort without them. Unlike most other skills mining also seem to get faster to level the higher the skill they have (excluding 5+ and so). So that if you start with good miners they will be legendary much quicker than unskilled.
The carpenter alone can produce enough products to trade the merchants for everything they got. So you can just ask for whatever you need including steel items (just let him make about every fifth item a trap weapon). If they arent of the type you need, dont worry just smelt them and let your armorsmith create something nice out of them. Also a good way of getting meat, fish, berries, seeds to mix the food up. Its much quicker to trade it from a merchant than to collect it yourself. All those masterwork items he produces will also give happy thoughts, sometimes much needed in the beginning.
If you are planning to do something big with your fort (or letting each dwarf have decent rooms plus a legendary dining room) then a good mason is invaluable. Specially if you are building a castle or something along those lines because blocks are so much lighter than stones. Until he has a decent level the mason is sooo slow as well. Making doors everywhere will take forever and you will be missing a lot of happy thoughts from not having masterworked items for some time.
A good armorsmith saves a lot in both time (both spending before hes trained and all items that must be hauled before he is) and resources to train the armorsmith up, if you dont have access to magma yet cos you didnt have good miners then its even more so. Same with weaponsmith obviously. Of course masterwork items are far superior to the ones you get from goblins/at embark (that 3x hit/deflect is huge) and having a leveled armorsmith/weaponsmith increases the chance greatly.
Always lacking pots/barrels? Embark with a stonecrafter. He will make barrels out of rocks, which you should have lots of. He can double as a jewelcrafter a skill sometimes not used much, but when it comes to trading with elves its always neat to have higher value cut gems or just some extra value in a pinch. If you want to level him on rock you get so much low value clutter.
Do you want traps built quickly and weapontraps that work? You need a good mechanic. Good mechanisms decrease the risk of weapontraps getting stuck (which makes your idiot dwarves try to go out and unstuck them). It also increases the speed between each activation and the activation speed of traps, levers, pressure plates you name it. In addition if you are going for a fort with maximum value (some say the dwarviest of forts) then masterwork mechanisms are very valuable. A personal experience is also that masterwork mechanisms seem to produce a lot of happy thoughts, no idea why. Perhaps its the endless row of traps in my entrances.
A clothier might seem like a fairly useless skill, but infact masterwork clothes are worth quite a lot. If you want to trade with elves or dont have anything else to trade with merchants then having few piles of masterwork lightweight clothes can actually pretty easily trade for much of what they have. Not to mention the obvious fact that sooner or later you need to have a constant production of clothes and bags, a skilled clothier helps with this.
And so on....
