Work has been eating basically all my time this whole year, along with getting back to the gym now that I identified the cause of some internal distress that was interfering (50% dairy by weight diet with randomly acquired lactose intolerance, woo!).
And now I've discovered there's a new edition of Savage Worlds, that might address *some* of the issues I had with 1e (namely, attributes not contributing to skills terribly much, and also gear, plus some new improved rules apparently). Going to grab ahold of that, do another First Impressions like I did for Savage Worlds Deluxe, and then determine what (if anything) is required to fix things.
As much work as I've put into this, having to not homebrew stuff is lazier. And, if they still didn't fix it, it'll still mostly apply probably with a few tweaks.