MCP pollutes the context, if you dont care about wasting context token for all MCP tools, go ahead and use MCP, but you should know that cli tool+skill can perfectly replace it with less token overhead and better matching due to skill's front matter
That really depends on how your harness implements MCP client. There are implementations that don't pollute context any more than CLIs, but if one uses only CC, he would never know.
Sure but on the flip side, skills not being in context means that for many harnesses, the model simply never finds them. Whether MCP or Skills are "better" depends extremely heavily on the context management functionality of your harness because if you use a relatively naive harness (i.e. one that implements MCP and Skills in a straightforward way), MCPs will generally be more effective, especially if your model is local-only (i.e. dumb), but at the cost of context.