The reason people are "bashing" him is that:

(1) He won't specifiy why it takes "two years to be able to play". People have asked him what he thinks takes two years to train and he refuses to reply.

(2) With respect to his friends quitting, it's blindingly obvious that they did so because HE made them think they'd have to wait 2 years to be able to play.

He is quite literally the very problem that he's complaining about.

...yeah, like I said before. Your problems are wholly borne of a neurotic need to min/max.

So, let's review your position, in aggregate, now:

-Economic activities don't count, they're not fun.
-PvP doesn't count, you have to able to fly command ships or carriers before you can do that ****.
-PvE? Level 4s or bust. It's not relevant that newer players can engage in comparably rewarding PvE mechanisms, because... because... just because.

What did I say earlier?

I started to PVP after a month or so.

You definitely don't need 1.5 years of skill training.

500k subscriptions is "low"?

Obviously WoW has more, but EVE is certainly in the front rank of subscription MMOs

Name 3.

No lvl 4 missions.
No attribute implants.
No double speed training to 1.6 million SP.
No battleship spawns on any kind( even in 0.0 space).
One was lucky if he/she could make 5 million isk a day in those early days.
No anomalies.
No officer spawns.
No T2 of any kind, be it modules or ships.
No sleeper space at all.
Roughly 70 skills to train initially.
No hardwires.
No drugs( AKA boosters) of any kind.
No capital ships.
No GTC's to make isk by selling them on the eve market after having bought them from CCP( shame on you CCP to implement a pay to win scheme like this, even if there's skills to still train up).
No POS's or outposts in 0.0, so we were always fighting for the same NPC stations in 0.0 space, fountain being at the top of the list since it was a small region with only 3 entry points( easy to defend basically), but with a lot of NPC stations and awesome minerals.
Server crashed or was rebooted 2~3 times a day on average.
3000 people logged in on average, and 4000 to 5000 on weekends, so you were on your own most of the time given the 5000 systems in eve( not counting sleeper space of course).

Everything I wanted to do being 1.5-2yrs away was the REASON I kept subbing.

I-¦d like to drop my 2 cents in here.

Firstly, I think that the "SP wall" is there when you consider solo activities mainly. In a fleet that picture is a lot different as you can help in many ways even with a new character ... the main point here being that if you solo you will have a hard time, otherwise, no.

Secondly, I do think that EVE Devs have to be careful about power creep ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_creep ) , because things like spliting Battleship skills into racials is what makes it take much longer to reach desired goals. I partially agree with the statement that the SP time it takes to train skills makes some new players give up on the game, but i also think that new players would enjoy the game better if there were tools to help them do what they want faster ... FW for example tries to take PvP to newer players ... the problem is teaching them how to get there and interact with it. Overall I think the game is improving with every patch. I could see a instantiated PvP arena / battleground system helping in getting players to keep playing the game. How about AT style fights for different SP level of players ? ??? ?? That would be awesome in my opinion ... I for one dream of geting in an AT team someday but I still got ways to go on learning PvP and geting Kills before geting there ... and I've been asked to train to certain levels of skills several times before joining a corp ... which makes SP a WALL to joining serious corps.

I gotta go now , but i hope my words make some sense, didn't have time to re-read it all.

Fly safe o7.