What's In a Name?

I've concluded that some of the skills are poorly named, specifically the ones that are obviously and easily derived from a verb: perception, persuasion, deception, intimidate, investigation, and performance.

The problem is to do with action declaration. Ideally, the player should declare what they are trying to do and how they are trying to do it, whereupon the DM decides what roll (if any) they should make. But with those skills the process gets short-circuited: "I try to perceive my surroundings" is a valid action declaration, but it's nothing other than "I roll Perception" restated.

So I'm inclined to think that perception should be renamed to senses, while investigation should be renamed to something like inference.

Performance, meanwhile, I would remove and replace instead with proficiencies in the various styles of performance - most of these are already covered by tool proficiencies, so all that would needed added were things like oratory, song, and the like.

As for persuasion, intimidation, and deception, I've mentioned before that I would be inclined to remove these and instead use proficiencies in social groups (veterans, criminals, scholars...), thus spreading out the "talking to people" skills. Deception, intimidation, and persuasion then become different approaches one can take to social encounters, some of which will work better than others.