Why was Farkas given such lame skills. A level 50 Farkas has 100 smith and 100 Speech? Almost no combat or defense abilty?

With him being the master trainer in heavy armor why is his max 20? He would be a valuable guy to have around otherwise.

Is there any benefit to a follower with those abilities? Is he going to persuade someone for you or make you a set of armor?

Do you think the Devs did this on purpose or is this just a bug?

On a separate note, companion followers would be so much cooler if you could ask them to wolf out.

Farkas isn't the brightest of the Companions. Maybe that's the joke though. He's trying to be a great warrior by studying non combat oriented skills.

Sort of on purpose. Armor trainers are assigned to the Blacksmith class, so his primary abilities are speech and smithing with a little of one-handed and pickpocket thrown into this.
To have the right skills, he should have been tagged as Warrior like the rest of the Companions (except Aela).
It's still weird though that armor trainers don't actually have any armor skills. Somebody overlooked this, I guess.

Too bad speech and smithing have no use as a follower.

Farkas... I think this is an intentional variation of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fracas. He tells you he's not the brains of Ysgramor, but the muscle.

Too bad all that muscle is good for is swinging a hammer at an anvil. And in a way that is not at all useful to the player.

Farkas is listed as a Blacksmith of the "TrainerHeavyArmorMaster" variety. The problem is that, while all of the armor trainers are classed as Blacksmith, their respective tags ("TrainerHeavyArmorExpert", etc) allocate skills differently, and it honestly seems as though someone wasn't paying attention when they input (or copy-pasted?) the data for some of the class/tag designations. Farkas gets the worst of this, though he isn't the only one with odd skill assignments.