The issue with skills and focuses seems like something that could easily be dealt with by the GM limiting the options the players can chose from, though that might go against the spirit of the game.
I believe the whole point of a billion years into the future is that you can find absolutely everything you can imagine lying around somewhere If you run it in a different setting where there are rules what kinds of things exist and which don't, you probably have to do that anyway.

How well does the game do in regard to the rules supporting and reinforcing the premise of treasure hunting in the wild? For character creation and action resolution, I can simply run Barbarians of Lemuria and I'm fine. But I've seen a couple of games in recent years that have the mechanics and rules set up in ways that nudges the players towards behaving as typical for the genre, by making such actions both very effective and also rewarding. You can roleplay in D&D 4th edition and you can make an epic battle against the forces of Hell campaign in B/X. But Atlantis: The Second Age and Spirit of the Century really nudge players towards doing outragous stunts with more carrots than sticks.
Since the premise of treasure hunting in a mostly rural frontier setting is what I find the most interesting about Numenera, how does the game do in that regard? Is it a treasure hunting game, or an anything you want game that explains the abundance of weird technology and creatures by them being scattered everywhere?