Foormort:-
Your sentence:-
"If I walk into an interview and I can say yes I had some skills but I found the MBA an excellent way of developing them and introducing plenty of new ones, I feel it would make me more competitive."
That to my mind is a perfect attitude to display--more power to your arm!
You ask how I chose my school. I chose on reputation alone and assessed the networking possibilities--full of bravado after visiting the schools and talking to people there, I applied to HBS and LBS and took the Princeton Test. At my LBS interview, I mentioned I had applied to HBS as well as several others, and played my card of wanting to get back into engineering industry (this was the time of severe manufacturing down-turn). This seemed to elicit some patriotic sympathy!