In something like say DuoLingo or Candy Crush, the progression is treated as literal physical progression along a path. So skipping make sense as you’re trying to get to a new “physical” location that is past where you’re currently up to. But in those systems you are at a point, e.g you’re on level 37 - you never have to go back to say level 23 once you’re past it if you don’t want to.
In HH, I don’t feel like I’m trying to get to a place*. There isn’t a path I’m progressing through, no physical space representation of the content. HH just does not present as a journey that goes past things (to me). So the idea of “skipping” something doesn’t even actually apply to HH. Even if you treat the character list as “the path” because of how SRS works you’re constantly reviewing EVERYTHING up to that point so you’re never really “past” those items, they’re just now in your backlog and might show up at any point.
If I had absolute authoritarian control of HH I’d rename the entire skip feature to “ignore” and drop the “moving past thing” metaphor all together since it doesn’t fit with how SRS systems work. Any form of arrows will have issues with the “get there faster” vs “go past this” type mix ups IMHO.
And as always, very conscious that I’m a sample size of 1!
*(This is also why I would still pay a lot of money to get the queue system I wrote about previously, since I don’t think about the HH content as a path I’m progressing along, just a bunch of items to be learnt, that I’d like to be able to order myself.)