Has there ever been a standardization of the adjectives to skills (destructive, movement based, etc.)? I've seen the skills sorted like this now and again but never got a round to asking if it was something official.
Not really. From what I've seen, very little on the Forums is ever really considered "official", and is more open to interpretation, discussion, and general consensus rather than anything being enforced as the "best" or "official" way to do anything.
Of course, it's always possible to go ahead with what
you believe is "best", and see if others agree with you, take on that thinking, etc. I'm sure that's how terms like "backroute" come about: people use them, everyone seems to agree that it's a good way to describe something, and then the term continues to be used.
Your skill groupings certainly add more definition than mine, and people do indeed already use those terms.
Also I'd say we may as well keep the extra 5 skills.
Yeah, in fairness I probably wouldn't want to remove anything really. If anything, I'd want to add Grenaders back in and bring the skills up to an even 22. These could be arranged across 11 buttons as well, meaning that all skills could always be available for every level. This would likely make for some hideously complicated levels, though
Change some skill panel buttons to have to right click anywhere in the level, then select them through a context menu.
I get the idea, but... wherever possible, a player should only have to do one thing to access a feature. Either use a hotkey, or press a button. Accessing skills via context menu would be a headache for speedrunning or even just normal real-time play, and would also require remembering that they are there. NeoLemmix is already complicated enough, I'd personally prefer to avoid adding more menus.
Remove some skill panel buttons to only be hotkeys.
Yes, this is better. Direction Select and Framestepping are easy wins, since it's much more intuitive to simply use left/right arrows for direction and any hotkey you like for -/+1 frame skip.
The CPM/Load Replay button could also arguably be removed for the same reason, although CPM is a feature which players may not know about and since it's extremely useful, a case could be made for keeping this available in the panel.
Paws, Nuke, Fast-Forward and Restart could be condensed to 2 half-buttons each, or even 4 smaller circular buttons which take up a similar amount of real estate. I'd personally want to keep these ones panel-available though, ideally.
The Release Rate controls could also easily be condensed to a single button space as well.
As a side-note, I'd also like the half-buttons to be able to be visually "pressed", like the skill buttons can be.
Make the skills half-buttons.
Yes, I've thought this myself. It'd be harder to make it clear which is which, and how many of each there are. It could get potentially very messy and is only worth doing if it's decided that all 16/21/22 skills should be made available all the time.
Make the map smaller.
Yeah, this should happen. The minimap doesn't need to take up as much real estate as it does.
Allow left and right on the skill panel and don't show everything at once.
I'd prefer not for this one. This comes back to the "player should only have to do one thing" argument. The beauty of Lemmings has always been that everything you need is available to you immediately, and this should be a standard to aim for.
There seems to be some extra space at the bottom when I play NeoLemmix, but I don't know for sure about this one as it might be dependent on what type of monitor you have.
Yeah, it all depends on how much screen space a player has. Monitors vary more widely than ever in pixel size, so it'd be difficult (but not impossible) to find a standard for this.
Maybe the user could even customize their own skill bar (how many skills, custom hotkeys as skill panel buttons, whether to scroll, etc.) but don't want to get ahead of myself.
Yes, this is a great idea. It's one I've talked about previously, although I can't find the topic where it was mentioned.
If "SuperLemmix" ever becomes a reality, the panel would ideally be completely customisable. I imagine that there would be a certain number of buttons (say, 20, which only increases the current number by 1) and then players could choose which features they want to be panel-accessible, and everything else would be hotkeys. This way, something like CPM could be available by default so that players not used to this feature get to know that it exists, then decide whether they'd prefer it to be a panel button or a hotkey.
Related topics:
Defining the "classic 10" skills (after the title question had been answered, I asked "if you could only pick 10 skills, which would you pick?")
Reorder skills in skill panel? (contains discussion on whether the bomber is primarily a destructive skill or a sacrificial skill)
Great topics, well worth a read if you haven't already
the original 8 skills plus
These would always be available, for sure. It's the reason I chose 16 as a number, so we'd have Classic 8 and Relatively Recent 8.
What's more likely is that all current skills would be kept and the Grenader would also be added, bringing the total to 22. I guess that in this case, a standard number (such as 10, or maybe 12) would have to be decided upon as a maximum possible skills-per-level, as is the current case with NeoLemmix. Having said that, it seems a shame not to introduce the possiblity of having all 22 available if there's a neat, tidy, easy way to implement this without making the skill panel look monstrous or having to menu-dive to access the extra skills. Maybe Lix's panel could form the basis of an idea to get this done.
14: Lix's batter. Well, you didn't say I had to pick from skills that exist in NL 
and the batter is a unique and really interesting movement skill because of the way it requires one lemming/lix to interact with others, and a whole crowd can be batted if they are tightly packed; it also allows blockers to move without removing terrain.
Yeah, I love this one as well. New physics, though, and I barely even have the programming experience to put timed bombers back in. Perhaps if someone more experienced than me wanted this and was prepared to do the work putting it together, it wouldn't be out of the question by any means.
15: Grenader. Yes, I loved this and I want it back, which shouldn't be too hard since the code already exists.
Massively agreed. This should have made the NeoLemmix new skills cut, baffled as to why it didn't
With apologies to namida, I just don't find the new NL skills anywhere near as cohesive or interesting or versatile as either the original 8 or the Lix set.
In fairness to namida, all of the new skills work great with very few bugs and they're all easy to predict, manage and make great levels with. The Fencer has now been made all but obsolete by the laserer (to the point that I'm seriously considering redesigning & re-releasing all of my Fencer levels to incorporate the Laserer instead), and the Disarmer is really difficult to use creatively without making it a pickup, but other than that I personally think the new skills are more than decent.
The Slider is a bit of a pain with its "sticky" physics, meaning lems turn around from even the smallest drop, but I ended up using this a lot in the Honey-themed levels in Lemminas II, and it work a treat for making the lemminas look and feel like bees!
This means the five skills not chosen are fencer, disarmer, stoner, glider and swimmer.
I'd say Fencer, Disarmer and Stoner would be the easiest to see the back of if any did get culled. In dreamland, we could then have Grenader and Batter and just bring the skills to an even 20!
