...While skill learning relative to what it cost you years ago may have gone down...compared to comparable games available it's still very high.

Most games have zero or minimal skill learning. This game one can expect to spend at least 40 hours spamming skills over the life of their character and more if they have low intelligence and the whole time they're at a non-trivial disadvantage to people who level sit with perfected skills.

That "meta" doesn't work in 2015 like it might have worked in 1998. I encourage you to worry less about historical standards for CF and consider the relative time investment compared with other popular current games.

The big thing about CF is that your characters *DIE PERMANENTLY*. I feel like your role and descriptions and actual interactions/leveling should be your largest time investments with skill spamming relatively small/trivial by comparison. This forces you to interact with other people and roleplay.

Every hour you're skill spamming by necessity you're doing nothing else and hiding from everyone else in the game.

Edited for emphasis on the last sentence.