@QuantMech, re. your original question, for me it depends on the specialty.
When my daughter needed surgery the referring doctor gave us two options, the surgeon with very good surgical skills and good people skills, or the surgeon with amazing surgical skills but horrendous people skills. We chose the second. The referring MD was right-the guy was creepy and unable to communicate, and neither D nor I liked him, but the fact that he had the personality of a turnip didn’t matter anywhere near as much as the fact that he was the one more likely to get her out of surgery without complications.
On the other hand, for many years I put up with a PCP with terrible people skills. She was condescending and dismissive and I always left the office frustrated, but since she knew her medicine and I was healthy and hardly ever saw her I kept putting off the task of finding a new PCP. After a radiologist misread my mammogram and sent me home with what turned out to be cancer I knew in my gut something was wrong but I delayed making an appointment with my PCP because I thought she’d think I was a hypochondriac. By the time I finally went to see her the cancer was advanced enough that I needed a year of nightmare treatments resulting in side effects lasting to this day. In this case lousy bedside manner led to a demonstrably worse health outcome.
One of the best things my kids’ pediatrician does is encourage her patients’ parents to trust their own instincts. Thus when D’s stomach ache seemed out of the ordinary I advocated for her and the pediatrician trusted me and gave me an immediate appointment. An hour later she was having an emergency appendectomy. Good people skills on the part of the doctor may have saved D from a burst appendix.
Lately I’ve been dealing with a horde of doctors treating my elderly father. Dad almost died in the hospital when multiple doctors wouldn’t listen to him and hear what he was experiencing.
So while obviously we want both people skills and technical skills from our doctors, from my personal experience I’d lean toward:
Pediatrics, Internal Medicine/PCP, Geriatrics- People skills first.
Radiology, Research, Surgery- Technical skills first.