"Vanity"? Really? How would you respond if I said "I'm struggling to see any reason other than self-centred entitlement for you to demand special treatment"?

Have you considered that maybe it's not "Vanity", but simply the perspective and experience gained from years of playing the game and interacting with other players that leads us to say that actually the skill system is pretty good as it is?

From the olympian perspective of playing for almost 7 years, and regularly associating with players who have plyed both much more and much less than me, I'd say that you're significantly constrained by your skills until maybe around the 7-8M SP mark. After that, assuming that you have spent your training time wisely, you're in a position to be pretty much on a level (a few percent less raw DPS, perhaps, a few hundred EHP behind, but not really much of a perceptible difference) while flying the T1 frigates and cruisers; after that, what you're mostly doing is expanding the range of ships you can fly well.

Your complaint is based on the idea of "catching up". You might also wish to consider if that truly applies to EVE in the same way that it does in "normal" MMOs: What EVE's skill system does is encourage the normal progession model of content "throttling", but unlike most games, it doesn't enforce it - there's no "You must be level 85 to board this ship" barrier. If you've got the ship skill to one, that's all the game cares about. And that's the wall that you're running into, because you're used to games that don't let you even try to do stuff you're not ready for. It's a fundamental principle of EVE that it allows you to make bad decisions if you want to, and it won't protect you from the conseqences.

If you try and "rush" to battleships, all you'll be doing is doubling that constrained time, and massively increasing the cost of your losses. You can do that if you want to, but don't expect a lot of sympathy if you ignore the advice of all those veterans "protecting their vanity" and find out that you're just spending longer in the skill deficit hole as a result.