The second article mentions having different point costs for skills and attributes, "so a point of Strength can have a different price than a point of Agility." Very interesting.

And since we were just talking about Charisma being a dump stat, this kind of system might be a solution. Charisma is never as useful as combat skills to most characters (often, you'll want one character with some Charisma, but never more than that), but what if Charisma was much cheaper to acquire than the other stats?

It would still need to be valuable to characters, but it might not have to be equally valuable, if it wasn't equally expensive. There's a lot you could do with this kind of system, though I suspect that play balancing would be a nightmare (as we see in that article, in fact).
 

What's funny is that as a long-time player of the Hero system (Champions, Fantasy Hero, etc.), I don't even consider this unusual. I guess I should, because it is pretty untraditional. Charisma in the Hero system costs only 1/2 of a point, whereas a point of Dexterity costs 3 points.

So that adds a new definition to "dump stat" - if you find yourself with a point left over with no good use for it, there's a tendency to dump it into charisma just 'cause.