While the non-abyssea way of skilling up is true for melee combat and melee skills (if you are solo and the mobs are attacking you), it is far from true for enhancing, summoning, or geomancy magics. The OP is absolutely right in that these skills take excessively long and that the rate is a bit archaic at the moment. Spending hours of skilling up spells for 2-3 ranks is simply not a reasonable rate here anymore.
This is all because the calculation for skillup chance is different for effects used on players (like enhancing/summoning/geomancy magics) than it is for effects used on NPC's (like combat skills or elemental/enfeebling magic). If they altered these skills to at least use the same chance as NPC targetted abilities that alone would make a MASSIVE difference.
