Quote Originally Posted by Marlowe View Post
It's noticable that the Hexblade and Warlock are two classes with strangely low skill points relative to their number of class skills.

Warlock doesn't suffer too much here, simply because Warlock is stat-independent, can afford a reasonable INT without gimping more core abilities too much and are supposed to be mostly human anyway.

Hexblade, on the other hand, needs good physical stats and CHR, so generally has to make INT a lower priority. Having so few skill points and so many useful class skills starts to hurt.
Hexblade was probably intended as a fighter alternative. Since fighters get 2+int mod skill points, hexblade followed suit. Also, because this was so early in the 3.5e development cycle, certain novel features (like ability to cast spells in armour, or heck, even an improved familiar with full bab) might have been deemed too powerful in theory, and so the rest of the abilities weakened to compensate (but turned out to be non-issues in actual gameplay).