I want to say first that I've taken some time to understand the system and am using to my advantage. I can get survival, farming, and exploration higher than they were with ease, and that's great. However, I can only do it with multiple pieces of equipment that I constantly have to change around based on what I'm doing. That's neutral to me specifically, because I already did that. However I know people for whom that's awful, since they can't spam the gildings and equipment necessary to reach the point they used to be at. Over all, I honestly rather like this new system, though I do feel it needs to balancing and adjustment.
Here's my gigantic overwhelming problem:
You dropped this update mid-world. It completely destroys lots of peoples built up equipment and makes weeks of work for silk gear utterly useless. Even if there's some small boost to second slot chance on silk gear and similar tiers of equipment, that is is no way a valid return on the sheer amount of time and effort silk and similar higher end materials take to make. This should have been delivered during a new world, not in the middle of a running one so that people could all be on even footing (more so, at least) regarding the changes. That wouldn't help high end gear, but at least no one would lose weeks of effort in a moment over it then. Even if you wanted to drop it during this world, you should have made gildings less of a total requirement (i.e. suggestions to retain current skill boosts from equipment and gildings provide a smaller bonus on top of that) rather than just utterly gutting everyone's built up equipment.
This really badly hurts people in the middle of progression and those without large stockpiles and puts them at the mercy of those with more buildup far more than they already were, and that power imbalance is a very dangerous thing in a game like this.
Also, the rest of the update is totally fine, especially the hardcap on skills from gear. It was silly to boost stealth by +20 before when I only had 1 point in it.