Fair enough.
The cleanest way I’ve figured to solve the issues so far is that when the player uses the object, that object triggers an interface to make and then fetch two different arrays from the player that contain the values of all that player’s skills, then have the object select the correct skill by index number, and just have that index selected as a variable.
It works, and it’s accomplished my goal of letting me set the requested skill on any child objects without having to reproduce the entire network on a per-object basis. It’s not as “user friendly” as displaying the skills by name, but just keeping track of the index number for each skill is an acceptable compromise.
Thank you two for the help/suggestions.