I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, and if someone else already posted this idea, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I think it is workable both for players, who don’t want precious earnings to go wasted, and the Devs, who I’m sure want the luck of the draw to mean something.
The Idea: allow a player to use an extra cover as a “respec point”. So for example, if I have Hulkbuster at 5/2/2 and get a sixth red cover, I can use it as a respec point to change him to 4/2/3 or 4/3/2, my choice. This means the extra cover isn’t wasted, because I can use it to rebalance away from the capped skill, so the next HB red is actually useful, but the cover gets used for swapping skill progress instead of advancing. My progress is half as fast as it would be if luck had just worked for me, but I’m still making progress. So in the above example, if I had “standard bad luck” ™, and got 8 extra HB red covers, my progression would look like:
5/2/2
4/2/3
5/2/3
4/3/3
5/3/3
4/4/3
5/4/3
4/4/4
5/4/4
So it took me 8 covers to go from 9 total skill ranks to 13, because every other cover could only be used to respec instead of advance, but I still got there eventually. A luckier set of draws would have gotten me there faster, but at least I know I’ll get there and the cover isn’t a total waste.