The weapons skillset has a generalized Melee/Ranged Mastery, along with Offhand Mastery that is train concurrently with the specific weapon skills, that helps when training new types of weapons.

For magic there is the Primary Magic skill that helps in the casting of specific schools (Debilitation/Utility/Augmentaion) and is also trained concurrently.

As we near the release of Enchanting, all planned skills from the Mech Lore split will finally be trainable. I don't know what the developer plans for Mech Lore are. My impression is that it would be removed when characters can finally choose to dump their ranks into one of the five specific skills.

Would people be opposed to keeping Mechanical Lore as a generalized Lore skill that works in the same way as Weapon Mastery and Primary Magic? A new skill that will be created when the last point of Mech Lore is dumped away. The skill would receive partial training whenever someone engages in an action that trains Enchanting/Outfitting/Forging/Alchemy/Engineering. Ranks in this skill would provide a general bonus when crafting items. We can call this whatever, either Crafting Mastery or even Mechanical Lore-- something that measures one's manual adeptness at making things.

What kind of bonus would it provide? For starters I think it shouldn't provide bonus to quality of the item-- that should be governed entirely on the current system. However it would be nice if it enabled a small RT reduction bonus, or make something that wasn't possible to craft, possible, albeit at a huge quality penalty.

Lore is a skillset that is hard to be trained efficiently because it would be weird to be knitting in combat. This puts it at a slight disadvantage to the other skillsets given today's TDP meta. Armor for instance, is a skillset that has the fewest number of skills, but since they can all be trained concurrently with ease, it's pretty OP. Tactics and Appraisal can be trained in combat, along with some guild-specific Lore skills. But it would "feel" nice when sitting there crafting with Super Long RTs crafting, you got two for the price of one, you know what I mean? It would make the game a bit funner, and equalize things.

I know there might be some negative sentiment against the TDP meta, but I feel the TDP system is too deeply rooted to fundamentally change. The next best thing is to balance the things adversely affected by it. The new REXP system, for instance, whether by design or on accident, puts a dent in the TDP meta with the pulsing xp absorb system, because training all weapons is no longer the best strategy if you want to maximize REXP time. I love it and think it's a great addition to the game. But this is another topic.

Also I feel keeping Mech Lore as a generalized skill would be nice because there are some systems such as Origami which I feel a lot of work has been put in, and I would hate for it to become obsolete. Braiding grass does annoy me though (along with collecting rocks). It is kind of weird to introduce a friend to the game, claiming it is a game about role-playing, but everyone is sitting there kicking rocks and braiding grass.