If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts.
Which really isn't too different from not having good enough gear in WoW and so on, the only difference is that in EVE you level up even when you're offline. And you don't have to fly anything, you do whatever you want to. Brave Newbies is probably the most famous for flying what ever the hell they could.
And they're still effective. Skills determined what roles you could perform well, but not that you couldn't participate.
I personally loved flying support, and knowing that not many people wanted to (or could!) gave me a valuable niche that not only made me feel important, but made me valuable in the eyes of my fleet mates as well. Hearing the FC call out "Hey guys, we actually have a logi in our BS fleet tonight, so be sure to call for reps" was great.
Those "newb" roles often have their own perks. You'll hear many a veteran speak of how a new player gets to enjoy certain things a veteran can't. We quite enjoyed bringing a new player on and explaining to them that these first days were their best, for now that they were in a corp, their costs were taken care of. Loss in EVE is the biggest, most stressful thing to manage, and it's fantastic telling a new guy "Look, you're inexpensive, so just tackle anything you can, we'll pay for your clones, buy you a stack of frigates. Enjoy these days you're expendable, and have fun while you're waiting for your skills to train up."
Those guys come in at a couple of months and tackle some Vindicator, and get on a 3bil ISK killmail. Show me a WoW level 10 that does that.
There was a big pay2win market in the form of buying characters, which was easily possible as you could buy them with in-game money and have them transferred. And you could buy in-game money by buying subscriptions and selling them for in-game money.
So there was a huge dollar to isk stream possible, which funded any gear or indeed any character (and thereby levels) you wanted.
The other way around of course existed (isk to dollar) but it was harder and not within the TOS.
I never did see lots of abuse of rich players and it never felt like a pay to win type of game to me or most people, but that factor definitely existed.
If you haven't got X months in battleship skills, you can't fit one to fit with the rest of the gang, so you'd have to fly support. Then the next level is carrier/dreadnoughts.
Worst part is there's no way to speed it up.