I would prefer the bottom one as it still has all the functionality and I think this is still ok in terms of too many buttons.
The first one was never the final plan, it was a work-in-progress shot.
Now I just hope enough people who voted for Neutral Lemmings to be introduced first change their vote to expand the skillset, because while I do admit that Neutral Lemmings provide more potential than I thought at first, simply having more degrees of freedom with regard to skill combinations is obviously going to blow the doors open much wider on new level-design possibilities... 
It's entirely possible this feature will make it in first regardless of votes, simply because it needs far less testing than neutral lemmings do - we pretty much already know, between running into the skill limit as an obstacle and seeing levels from Lix, that an increased skill limit will be beneficial, so we don't really need much testing for usefulness; and in terms of bug testing, it's a much simpler feature than neutral lemmings (although on the other hand - this is brand new territory, whereas on a technical level neutral lemmings are basically just partial zombies) - indeed, I would already be 95% confident about the current implementation. I don't believe we've got editor support yet (unless Nepster's done it), but if I'm not mistaken, the editor doesn't enforce the 8 skill limit when saving a level anyway; it just complains in the Level Validation tool if you've got more than 8 skills, and this is probably a matter of changing a single constant or conditional in the code. EDIT: Confirmed, this is indeed the case.
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