The skill point system was certainly poorly thought out. I remember purposely not choosing the skills I wanted to use the most as major skills, that way I would have the maximum 3x5 ability score points per level up. Lockpicking was just agility, or was it intelligence, training to me, I always carried around the maximum number of picks.
Before I could afford that I never bothered with locks, as there was never anything but random generated crap behind them, and the random generated crap got better with higher levels.