Does the number you have in a skill change anything? If I have no perks is my damage the same at 0 one handed as it would be with a 100 in one handed?

For my first mod i'm trying to make it so that skills level slower but give you a heck of a lot of bonuses, and perks become less important and a lot of the things they do would be put into the skill number.

I'd like that number to represent the player's knowledge of a certain practice and the perks to be techniques you can learn. Like how it is in vanilla with smithing, making different kinds of weapons and armor. You cannot learn that by practicing with steel daggers.

But it seems like the skill number doesn't change anything when I look at it in the editor and I assume i'd need a script to change it if there's no simple number in a menu I can edit, right?

I just found this while searching for some information around, and as you got no replies and I don't know if you found the info you wanted or not, I will just add my two cents.

Skill points matter, at least on some skills (if not all, didn't check them all). For instance, check this one here:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Speech

As you can see in the calculations for buy/sell prices, first you get a value based on skill points, and then another value based on a perk. Both values affect the final calculation. My guess is that for combat skills you get higher damage with higher skill, even if you don't invest in perks. Some perks will of course raise the damage even more (10%, 20%, etc...).