I have put a lot of hours into this game, both YO and MMO, with YO I played with several different servers with different skill multipliers.
I believe the intent of this game is to gain skills simply by doing what needs to be done. Terra forming, building, mining, combat drilling etc, but this is not really happening, I would recon there are more hours recorded in AFK/macro mode than folks actually playing and that can't be the aim of the game.
Most skills and combat simply go up sooooo slow that it forces the masses to look for skills that they can do in AFK mode or macro, this seems to be a waste to me.
Training dummies give so little experience that you have to find a partner and not 'spar' but rather have one stand and punch for hours on hours while you sit and parry, trying to find the sweet spot that will give you the extra experience and little damage. I don't know how many hours I have spent doing this to get my combat skills up.
For me this is the biggest drawback in the game, you logon and you only see a few folks actually playing, but lots of folks doing mass repeat of an action to either build a skill or gather enough mats to then build the skill.
Perhaps the reason behind the slow skill is to push for paying for power hour, it seems most folks in my guild use them and I feel like I need to in order to half my hours and hours of work.
I can tell you from playing on YO servers with higher skill multipliers it was a lot more fun, you spent less time 'grinding' and more time doing.
My 22 cents of feudal comments