It was quite awhile I played the game, but I have a vague memory of it being enormously time consuming raising ALL skills up to 100. It was much easier to spread them on 2-3 chars and not having to bother about locking and such.

What would be your estimate of raising all craft skills to 100 on one char?

Oh, and what is the point of skill decay in the first place? I thought it was to stimulate trading by making it much harder to be self reliant.

Sorry for being off-topic here...