I'm curious too. Aside from the "have to go in initiative order" thing mentioned above (Sorry? Is passing your turn not allowed if it's a challenge you don't think you can meaningfully contribute to?), I felt it was a decent take on the "complex skill use" rules; many systems have rules for using multiple skill checks for more complicated tasks. It has the the benefit of spelling out methods that people who don't share a given skill can contribute to the effort (e.g. a character without proficiency in Diplomacy using History to remember something useful about the King's past to help with negotiations).

My guess is people felt they were forced to participate in something they weren't good at? I think the rules were intended to allow multiple people to participate (so an important or complex skill check doesn't devolve into one person rolling lots of dice), but read like it was intended that everyone had to participate. Even with the latter reading, though, the mechanism should have people looking over their skills looking to see what they have that might be useful. There's a natural tendency for people to take whatever they already know and try to apply it to everything.

Personally, the only problem I ran into was having to explain the mechanism multiple times to the one person in the party who sucked at remembering rules (surprise, surprise).