to me part of the problem is the risk to loose everything against other players. it's just no fun having to start over rebuilding your fleet. if the game was more cooperative then that would be different.
Even if it didn't take dozens of hours (or more) of in-game work (or equivalent) to rebuild a nice ship, there's still the reward for time spent in game, which isn't unique to EvE, but is toxic.
Back when skills couldn't be queued, the devs at CCP knew exactly what they were doing. Force people to be logged in when their last skill had been trained, or they'd lose precious minutes, hours, days of training time. Once players are logged in, they might as well engage with other aspects of the game, getting more addicted to grinding.
The implants mechanic is terrible as well. For long-term use, maxing out learning implants is valuable, but that conflicts with playing the game where you want combat-related bonuses, so you have to jump around, which adds logistical difficulties. You have to be able to jump back to your learning clone before logging out for a while. And if you're not looking for an edge with a combat-focused clone, and you fly around with maxed learning implants, you lose billions, in addition to your ship and its modules, if you get podded.
The stakes for having to log out on short notice when you're PvPing in 0.0 or even lowsec can be losing your ship or worse, since you will at a minimum be separated from your gang/fleet, and might even be probed in the minutes before your ship disappears (unless they've changed that mechanic), or trapped if you log back in and warp back to a (same or different) gate camp. Having game mechanics that put a lot of pressure on players to prioritize game time over real life, is not good.
