A. Lumberjack

I had the same problem, but removing Crowd Source Science fixed it. Make sure you re-install DMagic Orbital Science after removing CSS. Other than that, it might simply be the bug you mentioned

Training kerbals sounds neat, although I envision it would have to be a significant cash investment. As to the skill-change part: As mentioned in another thread here, it seems to be impossible at this point as the skills are hard-coded to the kerbals names.