Van Buren perks

Prerequisites
In Van Buren, perks were no longer tied to your character's level, but depended solely on your character's statistics and skills. Only high-level characters would have high skills anyway, and powerful perks being dependent on very high skills would be more of an incentive to specialize in a given skill.

In consequence, a skill generalist would get more bang for his or her buck by spreading points around. He or she would make less overall progress, but would have access to more perks that make him or her even more formidable with a skill than the rank alone would indicate.

Perks should be more than skill increases
The concept that tended to run through perks was that the developers were seeking to make perks that would allow players to actually play differently. "If a player can take a perk for their character and it makes them think differently about how they are playing, that seems more interesting to me than just jacking the skill value up."

J.E. Sawyer said in another statement that he wanted to move past many perks that were just skill additions as he found that they didn't allow characters to do anything conceptually new. He noted that there were many skill-up perks, such as (Ghost, Thief, Harmless, Master Thief, Medic!, Mr. Fixit) that were under this category. He posited it may be a better idea to turn these perks into sub-perks of general skill perks. (E.g.: the player hits level 6 and picks skill++ perk, then is given another list showing all the skills. He or she picks one. On the character record screen, it shows Skill++: Computer Ops.)

Balancing perk distribution across skills
A large number of perks were also either directly related to combat skills or were completely unrelated to any skills (Strong Back, Quick Pockets, etc.), Sawyer was attempting to make more perks that were directly connected to having high non-combat skills, like Healer, in order to balance and flesh out the other dimensions of gameplay. In this capacity "manufacturing perks" were there that would allow "Science Boy" characters to create equipment from otherwise useless items that they would find in their travels. The items could range from drugs to explosives to medical kits and so on.

Perks replicating the function of skills
He noted that Master Trader (25% reduction in cost, which is the basic function of the barter skill essentially), Salesman (+20% Barter), and Negotiator (+20% to Barter) did not need to exist and may have been able to have been creatively replaced by concepts that were more involving. In light of this, he suggested some changes:


 * Bulk Trader: The higher the volume of items you buy and sell, the better the deals (players start to orient their inventory management and purchasing around getting the highest count of a single item).


 * Junk Merchant: All items worth 1-3 "dollars" are worth twice as much when you sell them (players store assorted odds and ends in their locker/trunk waiting for a rainy day to cash them all in).

Source
The known details about perks in Van Buren are largely derived from forum discussions of fans with J.E. Sawyer.