Well, here's the thing about EVE. You wanna be a trader? It'll take about 3 months to get good at it, and 2 years to be the best. But you need money, so you probably need a month or 2 getting the skills to mine to get the capital to start trading. And at that point the money should flow in if you master the trading game.
But, after that 5 months, your mining barge won't be enough, and your transport ship wont be big enough for the massive shipments, so you'd spend another 5 months getting into exhumers and maybe even an Orca. Once you're there, you can ship massive volume, but then there are supper massive freighters, another 3 months of skills and boom, now you can carry every ship you've ever owned, 5 times, in the hull of that super freighter. You can buy accross solar system, and you make a lot of money. You can mine out materials to start up the production lines, so why not own the production lines? So you become a manufacturer, that'll take 5 to 6 months to master.
EVE is complex, the learning curve is steep, but if you want to get into a field, you need at most 5 hours of training to get in (which runs passively so Yay!) Then you need about 3 months to get to the good part of that field. Then you need 6 months to master the field. And then you can throw in about 2 years of training that wont be as profitable as getting into nearby fields. Mining leads to exploring leads to manufacturing and trading leads to transporting leads to corporate management. Mission running leads to advanced piloting leads to exploring, leads to PVP.
And the world is such as there is a world for you to explore no matter where you are in your evolution. When it comes to the economy in EVE, everyone needs Tritanium, and you can mine that from the first day you get in the game to a reasonable profit. Everything above that depends on your choices.
And it isn't an addiction fest, you can start training a skill that takes 15 days to train and go on vacation, when you come back the world will still be there and suckers will buy your shipments of ore for twice what you paid 2 solar systems over.
Edit, not that I play anymore, but it isn't because of the game more than personal things.