EvE is what you make it
If you've ever had the chance to play EvE you would know that the learning curve is extremely steep. It will take you a while to actually get your head around what this game has to offer, but when you do you won't be able to let it go again.
The last few years EvE hasn't really been all that newbie friendly. It dropped you right in the middle of the game with a small ship strapped with a mining lazer and some sort of weapon. Then you would get a short introduction of the games features by the tutorial and that was it. From here on you were on your own. But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, you were free to do whatever you wanted, which was everything from mining asteroids to doing missions to blowing up other players ships.
This all hasn't changed, you're still free to do whatever you want, but since I first played EvE, the game has become a whole lot more newbie friendly.
Sure it can still be a struggle to grasp everything this game has to offer, but you don't necessarily have to. No one is telling you to be the ultimate miner/soldier/bounty hunter/trader/manufacturer etc. you could just focus on one or two of those to start with and learn the rest as you go.
Some people complain about you never being able to catch up to players who have been playing the game for years. While this is true, since maxing out all the skills would take 2+ years, you don't have to catch up tho others to be better than them. This game focuses more on player skill than the skills you train. Of course you will have to train some skills in order to fly a bigger ship and fit new weapons but I know a lot of people that have less than 2million skill points ( this is not a lot in EvE considering many pirate corporations have a 5 or 10 million minimum) who are good at PvP and even killing people who have twice or triple that amount.
There have also been complaints about death being too harsh in EvE. This can be true if you have a lot of expensive implants, have neglected to buy a clone upgrade( which are very cheap by the way) and didn't insure your ship. But it would really just be your own fault in that case.. The number one rule in EvE is "Don't fly what you cant afford to lose". Makes sense, doesn't it?
So just make sure you have a clone upgrade which covers your current skill point level, or you could even plan a little ahead and get the next upgrade, and you have insured your ship(although EvE have made loosing a ship without insurance less of a pain since ships now have an automatic insurance coverage of 40% of the ships costs). Also if you're afraid to loose your implants you can get a jump clone which allows you to "make a copy of yourself"( which is what cloning usually implies) which you can jump to and not worry about loosing the implants which are left back in the other clone.
Another thing that has been improved is the server lag. EvE online only has one server, which is great when it comes to immersion, but in the past this also meant lag. With 200.000+ subscriptions the server was sometimes struggling to keep up when a lot of players where in the same system. But now you hardly ever feel the lag, despite that EvE now has 350.000+ subscribers ( which is more that the total population of Iceland, the home country of its developers) except in Jita, which is the market hub of EvE.
All in all EvE is what YOU make it. You have the power to influence the game in some level. You can be a pirate in 0.0 space, or maybe a bounty hunter making a living by shooting other players, or maybe you just want to be a manufacturer or trader who's wealth could fund an army. It all depends on you.