The Callisto Protocol that you played now is not how it originally released. It was patched and tweaked a lot.
Also the gameplay is flawed. See the combat system with more than one enemy and it gets wonky. One of the changes was exactly to make enemies less aggressive as before they would often gang up on you and lead to frustrating deaths.
I like The Callisto Protocol a great deal as well, but it is a game flawed in what matters most: the gameplay.
People–whether that’s developers, journalists, or players and readers–will always matter more than what’s in a video game and the coffers that information fattens, whether those coffers belong to hackers or corporations. If that’s true today, it can be true tomorrow too.
The RPG skills are another middling feature as they help a lot of the exploration and conversational aspects of the game out and yet they’re paper thin at the same time. The game has you assigning points and yet I don’t feel that it would’ve played any differently than if I’d just picked skills at the start and nothing afterwards.
The RPG skills in a few scenes work as skill checks and can lead to different outcomes, impacting the story.
You can get a few playthroughs out of the game fiddling with them and the variations to the story they entail.
Money talks...