Let me clarify, I've never gotten to max skill level by combat alone. I recommend reading some of the thread I mentioned to get an idea of the various issues people had with the academy. I'm not doing the best job representing them all.
You are preoccupied with Max skills. Max skills is not supposed to be a common event, its not supposed to be easy to achieve either. If anything getting max skills in things like Bureaucracy and Oratory is too easy.
Think about it as a real life thing. I could practice fencing everyday of my life for years, either in a training format or by dueling, the manner isn't relevant. Chances are, I will NEVER reach the highest level of ability here. This is not a standard CRPG were max skills is a given. So to my mind we have two methods available to achieve a spectrum of skills. The first is to make skill gain reasonably difficult so it takes not just time, but singular focus to maximise skills, which is arguably what we have done with sword fighting. The second would be to randomly generate a series of limits on character creation which represent your characters skills in such things like reactions times, observational skills etc, and use those to limit the maximum level for each skill category for your character.
So to reiterate. IF you want maximum skills in some area's then you need to dedicate time, effort and resources to achieve this at the expense of participating in other area's of the game. That is by design, so to change this you would need to offer a compelling reason.