Fair enough, but I’d agree with conventional EVE wisdom that ships that aren’t specialized are mostly worthless and that a jack of all trades fails because he’s a master of none.
I also think that a PvP based character can spend the bare minimum in time required to get excellent Learning skills, decent Social skills and excellent Engineering/Mechanic skills while, still, setting course for pew pew.
And along that path comes the ability to rat/mission run extremely well, in addition to engaging in ganking. All that means that earning ISK is certainly easy enough, and if they’re part of a corporation, tasks like production/mining can come from other corp members.
Plus, even with the new (grrr!) restructuring in how timecodes are going to be done, a PvP skilled mission runner can easily make enough ISK to pay for a second account. FTR, I have a PvP spec’d main (who I love) and a mining/industry spec’d alt who I really don’t have much of a use for. I’m going to start a trade alt, freighter alt and POS gunner alt, but my main still has much more of an ability to provide all my characters with ISK than does my alt. In fact, my alt’s main source of income is her datacore farming. And although she has about 2.75 K SP’s in Social, that’s proven more than enough, and my main has generally been the one to actually run the missons she gets offered with his Raven or Ishtar.
Why? While my main sucks at making ISK via, say, production or trading, he doesn’t have to as he has a perfectly decent income stream on his own. If I wanted a trade alt, too, I’d be much faster just setting his training on pause, opening up one of the other two slots on his account, and creating a (gallente?) trade alt. A trade alt, I might add, who would train Trade skills much faster than would a balanced alt, and my main could always go back to training PvP skils, again, much faster than a balanced toon. The math really does support the fact that specialization is king.
Just as an overly simplistic example, let’s say that an ‘average stat’ character wants to train Gunnery V and Connections V. It will be longer, most likely by upwards of a day or more, for that character to train both rather than having a PvP and mission alt on one account and having the PvP toon train Gunnery V and then switching to the mission alt and having that one train Connections V.
While that’s a good point, the facts of the matter are, unfortunately, that once they do decide on a specialization, they’ll actually end up saving immense amounts of time if they re-roll for it at that point. Especially if they plan on playing for a year or more. After two years, the savings in terms of time are simply absurd, and we’re talking months of saved training.
CCP actually tried to cover it up at first, and it wasn’t until Kugutsumen brought everything to light that they actually began to change how their employees operated in the game. Then they banned Kug.
And you are right in that most of the BPO’s were worthless, but IIRC, they also gave BoB a Saber blueprint which was, and pretty much still is, the single best 'dictor in the game. Just for the record of course 
Well, it’s certainly true, for instance, that BoB’s ten (or more, by now) titans in a cyno-jammed chokpoint would require enough pilots to log on and jump into system that the entire node would crash. CCP really does need to fix those mechanics, as they’re broken beyond all getout.
There have, however, been rumors that they’re going to ‘re-seed’ Dysprosium and Promethium moons so varying regions (Drone Regions, I’m looking at you) aren’t quite so useless.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, as it’ll fuck up the EVE economy, hardcore, and I hate it when CCP does that. But something has to happen. BoB being functionally invincible due to server instability, not in-game tactics is just broken.