So i just beat wasteland 1 and I feel in some ways the game sets you up to fail. The manual is very vague about what stats actually do and this is some ways is very misleading. The only stats really worth pumping are IQ and Luck. The former to gain energy weapons and the latter because it improves ranged damage, evasion, to-hit. The rest of the stats are mostly pointless because they either do part of what luck does (e.g. dex improving ranged to-hit) or don't really come into play in any meaningful way (e.g. charisma).

Similarly, the majority of the skills are either 1-2 one time uses (e.g. toaster repair, bureaucracy, airplane pilot) or redundant to either stat checks or other more useful skills. In the same vein, hand to hand combat starts off useful early in the game and becomes useless quickly as you progress since ranged attacks always happen first.

It seems to me the game was fleshed out with an engine designed for pen and paper style game play but never adjusted to make the majority of the skills and stats worthwhile.

Finally, I feel the game lacks direction. The largest example is the lack of any indication that you need keys to self-destruct base concise or even where you would get these keys (just randomly grabbing them other places in the game essentially and hopefully not missing any or throwing any away). If you happened to miss one, you wouldn't even know and would just get stuck in base concise clueless as to why. I feel to successfully beat the game requires a combination of walkthroughs detailing what the stats and skills actually do, as well as, trial and error. Perhaps, the latter was the intention at the time of release to prolong the game experience?

A couple other things to note:

1. Remember that you can disband the party during combat. This means you can have some characters using ranged weapons while the others charge into melee.

2. The only firearm skill you need is Energy Weapon. Clip Pistols and Rifles are only relevant when melee attacks still dominate, and going full auto with an SMG or Assault Rifle (which you should do for all nontrivial battle as there's plenty of ammo) gives you a huge accuracy bonus.

Also, why do they have the redundant Medic and Doctor skills? (I have found that I can skip Medic because, early in the game, injuries are rare enough that I can reload if that happens.)

In fallout and fallout 2 medic and doctor are both actually useful because you have a limited amount of uses of either for a given time period but in wasteland that isn't the case. It just seems to be that medic is for those who don't have the IQ to gain doctor so you might grab it at the beginning to avoid a death scenario without reloading.

Wasteland was made in 1988. It was published at a time when software projects were pretty much dropped "as is" at publication time. Getting a patch out to users was really difficult.