I have been keeping out of the PLEX discussion because I felt there are enough people going back and forth on it already ... that said ...

Some additional issues that calls for further discussion:

1. Fear of Cash->Gil buying to move char ahead.
This is one issue SE need to address. With EVE online, your "skill" is limited by how many skill points your avatar has learned, and EVE uses real time as their limiting factor for this. No one player will ever learn faster then any other player.

As we can see with real time as your avatar's development speed, in EVE, in advanced levels it can take over 6 months for your avatar to be ready for the next ship. So even with ALL the cash, me buying that ship which requires 6 months of skill training time will not put me much ahead of another player due to this limitation. However, in this game, your skill is limited by your experience pts which we can cap over a busy weekend.

Balanced market:
EVE has a very extensive trading system. So much so, you can play EVE full time and do nothing but and just trade from a market with thousands of orders. I founded my 2nd account with 100m isk and was at 1.7B after one month, which in turn funded my 1st account's equipment purchases from there on. I can buy/sell anything, perform order updates every 5 seconds, and analysis market history with years of history based on my filter. SE's market system is at best a simple listing of the lowest 20 sell orders, and the last 20 solds. Current market system must include a lot more buy/sell/analysis functions in order to provide the tools necessary to create the condition for a balanced market.

Fear of F2P:
As I always tried to explain to new EVE players, it is do-able, but not feasible if you are working. Someone mentioned about doing it via mining. Using my own "friendlist" as the source, the best isk/hr (isk = eve currency) from mining I have heard in EVE was 20m/hr. The best I have done isk/hr playing was 12m/hr. Now, when you consider that the PLEX was around 300m, that will required at least 15-25 hrs of game play. For those non-income earning players, this F2P is still a very do-able option, but for those that do work, paying the $15/mo becomes the much preferred method. ;p

Hope this helps ...

jc