Cool game but I can't play it any more. So much wasted time doing nothing. It's worse than a second job.
Elite Dangerous sells a single upfront payment with there's no subscription which has its own weird effects, they have to budget each $X sale will result in Y hours of use before boredom sets in.
I wish there were a viable in between business model such that things are neither boring to get you to quit nor boring to keep you grinding forever. AFAIK no one has tried an ownership financialized space sim. Buy and improve and rent and sell space stations and ships using real microbitcoins or similar.
The lack of (required) grinding for XP makes the game a lot more relaxed than most other MMOs.
Grind is not the optimal subscription model. It exists only cause its easy to keep gamers engaged with grind.
The game has no grinding requirements. You can log in, ask someone for 20mil isk, you'll get it trust me. Then basically set a training regiment for the next 6 or so months, you might need to log in once a week to set the next week's training and log out. And suddenly be able to play a high-level game. If you have a friend in nullsec with good farming, grab an appropraite ship, go in, boom boom boom, money. Way less grindy than playing say WoW.
Even better. after those 6 months if you trained your way to a org doctrine, you basically go on, ask the org to please give you a ship, they will, at no cost. And then you have fun. Most orgs make their money from mining moon rocks, so they have fucktons of cash to give away for ships here and there.
Having said that, the times when there's action in the game, its like 3 hrs of hunting for 5 minutes of pew pew. Very uneventful. It is more of a game about making jokes and stories with friends.
Trust me it doesn't take six months to start to have fun in Eve.