Standard Litany of Complaints, GURPS

When reading forums and other material on the internet, there are complaints that are levied against this or that RPG. Upon reflection, it seems that many of these complaints can be compiled into standardized lists, and addressed generally. This is an amateur attempt to do so for some of the complaints levied against GURPS; said attempt will likely fail horribly in at least a few ways, and likely more.

• "There's too many skills."
• Don't worry. You'll probably never use basket-weaving.
• Yes. Yes, there are.
• Or rather, there's too many skills that all have their own unique special cases.
• And which probably do not need to be in a core book.
• You should be able to find lists of combined skills people have made.
• "It takes two hours to make a character."
• That's because your GM didn't take twenty hours to make templates.
• It's not like they could just use the ones in the books. They're off by at least 10%!
• It takes me about an hour or two to make a new character in nearly any new RPG.
• With practice, fifteen minutes is possible.
• Do you really need to read the description of "Completely Unkillable"?
• You're either not going to buy it, the GM's not going to allow it, or you're playing a high-power game, and I have no idea why you read the description for "basket-weaving".
• Now apply that principle to everything else in the GURPS books.
• "I made a hunter. Then they had no idea how to skin a deer, because they were missing one single skill!"
• This is why I allow all characters to be retcon'd after the first session of play with them.
• "I made an investigative reporter. But it turns out, they have no social skills. Can I change that?"
• "No."
• I do not understand this GM.
• Why do GM's talk about "punishing players for bad decisions", when you're playing a game?!
• Yes, I can understand "I charge the orc horde!" "You die. Heroically."
• That is not this, though.
• "We took five hours to make characters, then they all died in the first five minutes."
• Visualize the following scenario, as the first encounter of your adventuring party, and chosen by the GM as a typical first encounter: "Your fighter, arrayed in scale armour, warhammer, and shield; your rogue, with leather armour, short sword, and dagger; your cleric, with scale armour, mace, and shield; and your wizard, with readied spell; are facing a group of Orcs of equal size and skill, arrayed in scale armour, battle axes, and shields." Your expectation:
• If you checked the box marked: "Even in victory, in such a face-to-face, open-field confrontation, the winning side (which may well not be you) will face heavy loses", then you are ready to play GURPS.
• If you checked the box marked: "The GM should have either halved the numbers or severely reduced the opposing equipment and skill", then you are ready to run GURPS.
• If you checked the box marked: "We're playing brutal realism", then you are not ready to play GURPS, because what are you doing fighting an open-field battle when you chose "brutal realism"?
• Here's a secret: d20 D&D and later all start the PCs off at a large advantage versus even "equal-level" NPCs.
• If you want to play or run GURPS in a "D&D-style" game, you should account for this implicit power increase. This is why most GURPS fantasy games start PCs at 150-175 points, even though "skilled" is 50 points and "competent" is 100 points.
• "GURPS is too complex."
• In most games, you want to use all the rules and supplements.
• Don't ever do this in GURPS.
• Seriously, don't.
• They closed down all the asylums, after all.
• There's no diagnosis for "driven insane by GURPS", either.
• Use only the rules and few (at most) supplements you want to apply to that campaign.
• GURPS is more of an RPG toolkit.
• The rulebooks need better notation for this.
• I know the rulebooks tell you to make a list of every advantage and disadvantage you're allowing in your game, but if you tell your players "We're making low-level vampires who can generally pass as humans with maybe a few psychic tricks", and one of them chooses "Magery 5", you've got deeper problems than a "missing" list.

Upcoming: Standard Litany of Complaints, d20