I am not worried about skill training but I have learned tricks on how to gain them over the years that newer players may not have. High wisdom is a boon as is. The min maxing game of how to get the required failures needed for gaining skills should be detailed by the staff and code further though just to get us all on the same page. For instance, I think we all know once thought we could hamper our character's success rate by being burdened in combat; however, being burdened doesn't seem to affect crafting success at all, the code changed at some point so that this no longer was a functioning mechanic. There does seem to be a higher chance of failing a craft skill if you do it repeatedly, which has been referred to as a "crafting timer" before on previous discussions. Being drunk probably increases the chance of failure but it always felt dubious to me that people would learn their skills better while drunk (doesn't being drunk worsen memory retention?), but you often had that salty Byn sarge who came to sparring piss drunk because there was no other way they could fail and get a skill point somewhere. I do admit this mechanic is a time tested one and actually makes booze codedly advantageous and creates funny situations, though.
The real point is that if I just helped some player out there have an "ah-ha" moment by typing that sloppy paragraph above, then maybe we should just make a helpfile with a "guide to training your character's skills" that goes into more detail for advanced training and skill branching.
I also want to give a big kudos to staff for more transparency on skill branching order in the new guilds in development. This is already the direction I agree we should be going in, to demystify. The higher starting skills is fine also, I have asked for that in the past to help encourage people to roleplay as antagonists or be willing to take risks without so much fear of losing all the hard work they did to skill up their PC.
More important drawbacks to casual playtimes are definitely communication related. I have been a proponent of Waying offline, messenger NPCs, more in game message boards, etc, for a while. Just joining a clan is a big help currently but not everyone can deal with the isolation that may entail. A playtimes command that allows you to see when someone is usually around... being able to be pinged with an email once a day by someone who logged in just reached out for your character offline over the Way, if you gave them permission to notify you that way maybe. Plenty of options, all of which would improve means of characters finding each other.
Some folks seem against such ideas, seem to think that current means are good enough.. using other people to relay messages, clan boards, etc. I dunno how true that is for all roles. Some people play in tents in the desert. So... I do hope some of the previously discussed ideas get accepted some day.