my 2 cents:
First of all, I don't think you can do Copy Geom without AAX.
So then, the question is - what's the advantage of using the skeleton model type?
Personally, I don't think there is much difference from regular model type, but I like to use skeleton .prt model for layouts because the icon is different, and the model type is different. So it is pretty obvious that this is the "layout model".
And the software gives you the options of hiding the skeleton from the drawing views / removing them from the BOM tables, / excluding it from assembly mass calculations etc...