So, I'm building a character and I came across an oddity, though I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this.

Maxing out an ability costs 30 attribute points at character creation. When you max an attribute you 'lose' 5 points because of the 25 points to cap the ability. Thus, 5 points are 'wasted' if attributes are important to you.

If you take the quality "exceptional attribute" at the cost of 20 build points, you can bring that attribute to the same level (6) costing the standard 10 points. This frees up 20 points for attributes.

If used in this fashion, exceptional attribute gives players the ability to 'max out' (bring to 6) one attribute, while still having 20 points worth of attributes, essentially transferring 20 build points of attributes out of attribute cost (if that made any sense) A (human) character with a '6' attribute would otherwise only get 18 points worth of attributes.

Is this taking advantage of the use of the quality, or was it intentional?

On a human Raising an Attribute to 5 costs 40 Build Points, since the first point is free.

Getting it up to six costs either an additional 25 BP via the 'maxing out' rule or 30 BP (20 for the exceptional Attribute quality + 10 for raising it by one)

This adds up to either 65 BP or 70 BP, thus making the Quality more expensive .

You are right in that taking the Quality frees up 15 Points out of the max. half points for attributes pool, but given that he's already paying more for having the same number on his sheet and has used up nearly 2/3ds of his Quality Allowance I'd reckon that this doesn't make things problematic.

Attributes are among the cheapest karma buys.

Plus you only have a maximum bp Positive Quality total of 35: did you really want to spend over half of it on trying to bend the attribute bp ratio?

No question about it being a good deal at all.

Attributes being better than skills in regard to value per BP is a problem.
Using BP for character generation but Karma after that is a problem, since it leads to equal stats being different in price.
Realizing this and maxing your attributes isn't, as far as I'm concerned, especially since all those free points aren't. It's still 25 Points you're not spending anywhere else.

So in Summary its just a symptom of the underlying problem of skills generally being costed to high in comparison to attributes, so I'd rather worry about fixing to the point where spending BP on attributes isn't undeniably better than spending them on skills. But thats been discussed before.

I believe what was meant by the use of 20 points worth of positive qualities wasn't having to balance it out, but rather, you could buy 20 points of other qualities that give other bonuses. Of course, since you use attributes as part of determining your dice pool for tests, getting your max higher in an attribute has much greater effect than say, the +2 to fear/intimidation from 'Guts' where being able to cap willpower 1 point higher will basically give you +1 to the same tests, as well as +1 to ANY test involving willpower.