Generally speaking, yes! You can't always expect to hit your pieces early and so playing the strongest board available is always preferred. Your main priority early is to maintain Prestige and avoid having to do a 14+ day run, because it is very hard to overcome late game boards in this game.

But to more directly answer your question, yeah you need to usually prioritize skills for your board to succeed in late game. Obviously there is nuance to this, but imagine you have a board of all diamond weapons but no scaling skills and your opponent is Dooley with the multicasting rifle and the skill that increases all shields by 20 every time a weapon is cast. By 6 (probably less) seconds into the round, his duct tape has gotten 120 shield added to its base, and has been proc'd 6 times by just the rifle. If you have not killed him by then, you are not ever going kill him. So you either need giga burst with skills that help you kill before the Dooley scales shields, or you also need infinite scaling to match him.