There is a gigantic elephant in the room here...

DUST 514 needs players to be successful. Normally, you'd never hear me speak out for lazy mushbrains who can't take 3 days of playing a game to figure out how it works, but the entire enterprise that CCP is going for here is a massive COD or MW FPS crowd to populate the ground level combat of the Eve universe.

Two major things could crush this game if only 100k dedicated people end up playing it: 1) It is totally free. All incoming money relies solely on the AUR market. More players playing equals more people buying gear, boosters, etc... on the market. The second 2) is that there are literally a thousand solar systems or more in the Eve universe and most of those systems have belts, moons or planets that could be potential battlefields. If there are only 20k people signed into Dust 4 months after launch during a given hour because so many people jumped ship, that will make for a pretty pathetic number of active battles literally strewn across a thousand star systems.

I don't know about you, but I want as many people to stick around as possible for the second reason and CCP wants just as many peeps to stick around for the first reason.

IF implementing some kind of rookie skill and equipment training system will keep people logged in, I'm pretty much all for it. I am not for the dumbing down of this system as it is (it hardly seems complicated to me as I am typically not a FPS person) but the OPs idea would keep the game open to both types of players AND doesn't do anything that they couldn't do on their own already. The one point of contention I have is making stock dropsuit fittings easily available. MAYBE add some kind of "completed fitting" tax (5% over actual market costs) so lazy people can still play, don't lose too much ISK but are still being held responsible for their being lazy. "Convenience fee."

One thing is certain in DUST 514: more players, more battles, more AUR and ISK being spent...more fun for everyone.