A good SP system can make or break an RPG- especially a PVPMMORPG.
Dust had a terrible system that made breaking into the game too hard, but rewards came quickly. Still, the tree expanded vertically rather than horizontally and we did not enjoy. The passive UA-SP was nice but the active made it a grind which we did not like. We should play for ISK, not SP.

Eve had a better system. Lots of options, but still plagued by the five point level system and having to log in every few days to schedule skills is annoying; plus the best gear takes years to obtain- not something good for a shooter. SP should never be a motivation over the desire to just shoot stuff.

A better SP system would take the worst of the two out.
First off, the tree expands much more horizontally. Nothing is an SP sink, because every single weapon, vehicle, tool, salvage, drone, etc has a lot a lot a lot of unique skill associated with it. For example, salvaging for ship parts from a fallen cruiser at 100% efficiency is huge, but speccing for that will mean your ability to salvage charred drop suit energy cores is at 1%. This means that at 100%, efficiency, one salvage will return one item that is working at 50% capacity (efficiency(0.5)) and with 100% of the parts, so a Legionnaire could salvage a working cruiser by himself, given time, and turn around to sell a working cruiser to a Capsuleer at a huge discount because it cost him so little to salvage compared to the cost to manufacture one Eve-side. But that's just salvage.

Every weapon has a huge number of modifiers, but they're specific to the Legionaries abilities when using the weapon class (WC; referring to shoulder fire, single shot/ shoulder fire full auto/ SF-burst/ hip fire burst/ HF-Single shot/ wrist fire auto/ wirst fire SS/ large precision turret/ large enfilade turret/etc)rather than a flat damage buff. This includes, but is not limited to: reload speed, hip dispersion, ability to ads faster, movement speed while carrying the weapon, scope sway, stability when firing, ability to field strip and repair a broken weapon efficiently and properly, and everything else that affects the user's ability to handle a weapon, but not the weapon itself.

Above specific weapon type there is general weapons handling which would affect multiple weapon types (shoulder fired/ worst fired/ semi auto/ bolt action/ burst fire/ full auto/ explosive / HbR/ HbP/ laser/ thermal/ kinetic/ nuclear/ EM/etc). These encompass not just a small group of weapons, but many seemingly unrelated weapon. For instance, speccing high explosive+semi auto + wrist fire would give a big bonus to a wrist rocket sidearm but still carry over to anything that fit those descriptions so a nerf is not as painful as in dust because you spec one gun; this way, every skill point earned affects many things so everything stays relevant while still allowing the ability to specialize.

Beyond that, skill points are earned over time, and are more accurately measured in minutes than anything else. Investing time into any skill does not affect someone's ability to operate something past the first minute (one minute to be able to operate ANYTHING, but it does play a huge role in determining if that person can fit more than a small blaster turret on a Madrugar or if that turret will even fire straight for more than a second. What this all means is you start your journey as a worthless, untrained boot who can't do anything well, but can pick up anything and use it.

Being able to operate anything after a minute of training takes away the "he has better gear argument". This will mean that money is just as important as SP. But now the problem is getting player skill as a shooter to matter. The best way to do this is simply never let any one item be very powerful. True slaughters should happen when multiple veterans with complimentary skills team up. They do have, maybe 25% HP than the boot team, but they win because they attack where they cannot defend (attacked with air drones bc they lacked a low altitude air defense gunner).

On a similar note, new players can defeat stacked vet teams the same way. If a stacked vet team has a huge number of super OP heavy siege tanks, they can be defeated by a boot team utilizing a combination of air strikes, stone strikes, explosives, and anti tank rockets which are specifically all invented to defeat super OP heavy tanks and nothing else. Everything needs a few hard counters, multiple soft counters, and be strong or balanced vs all else.

What this means is that yes, the super OP 1.7 Tanks return more Op than ever, but so do Surya-specific AT guided warheads that have a 90% OHK rate and cost very little- trade off is that with how OP it is vs suryas, it is useless against anything other than a madrugar or soma. (Anti GA Heavy Tank munitions lock on to a very specific armor plate resonance frequency that allows them to hit the week spot 90% of the time, and 5% of the time hit hard armor for a 2hk, and a 5% miss rate. The munition is very slow to launch, accelerate, and track so it CAN target armor tanked dropships or infantry (with a spotter), but likely wont hit and the shaped charge leaves little room for splash.

An anti CA heavy tank would lock onto the shield generator and carry a timed warhead of initial EM to smash through shields, and then a light charge to bury into the thin armor, whereas an Anti-GAHT round would likely destroy a CAHT, the A-GAHT would be able to lock on without a spotter due to targeting specific armor resonance patters with it's internal radar. This level of specialization applies at every weapon, tool, vehicle, Nd so forth.

A skill is nothing more than a modifier of an items potential. Perhaps a shotguns spread is between 400 mils (potential) and 800 mills (default) (360-¦ = 6400 mils). The difference being 400. Now, every skill to reduce that (shoulder fired, semi auto, plasma [three tags per item]) creates q sum (3). 400/3=133.33. [133.3]/100=1.33m/SP

a swing, and a miss, as usual with you.