I've studied pickup for many years, and I can confirm that in areas of life aside from mating. I have skills in about half the items in Scott Adams' list that I wouldn't have if I hadn't studied pickup.

PUA ought to be a special case of a more general skill set, and it's being wasted.

Many PUAs are already applying the pickup framework to be successful in other areas of their life; as you observe, PUAs talk about this all the time. Yet while I think it's useful to take the mating component out of pickup, the mating component may actually a big part of how PUAs develop skills in non-mating areas.

If you are a beginning PUA, then you have a lot of areas that you need improvement in. You will probably need to work on your voice, fix your body language, get over shyness, become a lot more confident, and improve your fashion sense. Most normal self-improvement focuses on any one of those areas as its entire goal.

It may be that a big part of what makes pickup work for self development is that you are focusing on improvement in so many areas at the same time that tie together and mutually reinforce each other, and you do it all in service of a greater superordinate goal of mating.

Many people struggle with a goal like getting over shyness or insecurity on its own. But when you have an even bigger superordinate goal that depends on those goals, they seem comparatively less hairy, and you can't afford to fail at them.

I'm not sure whether having mating as a superordinate goal is special, or whether any other big superordinate goal will do.

I really like the idea of your project, but I'd like you to talk a bit more about the ideas in the seduction community that you think will be most relevant (I have some ideas, which I will share at some point).

I'm not sold on the idea of explicitly associating what you are doing with pickup, and least not in the title. Actually, I'm not sold on calling pickup itself "pickup." I see contemporary pickup as merely the systemization and extrapolation of what socially and sexually successful men are already doing.