Ok, fair point. I was thinking of the way I play at that point, not about giving useful advise.

And that as well, as long as the plan is to just add a dash of combat class and hit the required BAB, it's best to take fighter levels. (especially if one takes weapon specialization),

But that 9 skills topped, is for pure rogues with int +1.
With 50/50 split and no int bonus, a fighter rogue gets to top 5 skills, while ranger/barb gets 6.
Thats not really points to spare. When one usually wants to max dodge, use magic, search, persuade, heal, open locks, disarm traps, discipline and probably have decently high lore, set trap, hide and sneak. And then some more.

And OK. I'm again not really talking about SoU/HotU as per the original question, but community modules and such, where you don't really know if you'll need something or not.

Ah, now I get the distinction you were making. Yeah, I agree. Barring paladins and other alignment restrictions, this is pretty much how I see it too.

(though it still kinda bugs me I can't have a lawful bard or a chaotic evil druid. There'd be plenty of cool character concepts with that alignment and those abilities, but the game stops me.)

I feel like you're contradicting yourself. You claim that Ranger works better than Fighter because it offers more skill points, then reference build combinations and attribute distributions that sacrifice skill points to make your case. If you want more skill points, running 14 intelligence is easy to do, and if race isn't an issue then human gives you a further +1. A fighter/rogue along the lines that I described will have more skill points than any reasonable 50/50 split. The combat power gains by a 50/50 split over my suggested 20/80 split are actually quite marginal (a 1 BAB difference by level 20).

The exact proportions of Fighter and Rogue you need depend on what you want. If you want skill points, then 20/80 or even 10/90 is the right ratio. A 50/50 fighter/rogue split only really makes sense for prospective weapon masters. If you aren't taking the whirlwind attack feat chain, you'll run out of good pre-epic combat feats before you hit 10 levels of Fighter.

Agree with you there. I almost completely eliminate alignment restrictions on classes in my Pathfinder pen and paper game. The only alignment restriction I have left is "Paladins can't be true neutral", and have custom rules for the other 8 alignments.