So am I seriously screwing my incarnate here?

[Particle_Man]

I was planning an azurin incarnate (NG, but not the VoP route) and to take Bonus Essentia at 6th level and have the other 7 feats be incarnum feats (to add extra essentia to the pool). So the character would have 36 essentia points to move around at 20th level, which is nice. Not actually sure I will get that high, so this may be pie in the sky planning.

But I imagine that there are ways to make the character much more optimized.

I suppose I am asking, not how to make the character more optimized if it doesn't need it, but whether I am needlessly screwing myself over (to the point of dragging a party down with me) if I just stick to my original plan? So not "is this the best possible character?" but "is this a good enough character?"

Also, I was looking at the class skill list and thinking of just going cross-class with spot and listen (or maybe a few more if int is higher) to reduce the chance of being surprised. Not sure I really need the "classics" of concentration, know (arcana) and spellcraft. Good idea/bad idea?

[Big Fau]

Not really, so long as you can keep convincing the party to support your addiction to UMDing party-range buff spells (which, as an NG Incarnate, you should be).

[eggs]

Incarnates are all about cross-class skill ranks. So even though you're probably not going to screw yourself over with this, you still might think about picking up Able Learner to get the most out of those skill points.

[Psyren]

Incarnates are all about cross-class skill ranks. So even though you're probably not going to screw yourself over with this, you still might think about picking up Able Learner to get the most out of those skill points.

Seconded; Azurin are (human) so this feat is available to you, and it's a very good choice for an Incarnate.

Don't go hog-wild with your skill points though - many melds let you make checks untrained and have low DCs, so spend the few you have where they can do the most good.

As far as whether you're hurting yourself... well, one problem with farming out your feats as a source of essentia is that allocating that essentia to your melds means having a bunch of feats that don't really do anything. And if you take the alternate route and actually invest in your feats, your soulmelds will suffer, plus you can't get the essentia back out of the feats when you need it.

Have you considered Vivicarnate? (Necrocarnate adaptation, MoI pg. 135) You can open up all the same chakras as a pure Incarnate (even Soul) and you can end up with a metric ton more essentia than any other meldshaper class, enough to keep every single feat and soulmeld at maximum capacity if you plan things right. The only time you'd have to worry about essentia starvation is if you expect their to be downtime in your campaign longer than a day.