> it probably needs an exuberant amount of time
EVE can actually be played very casually. The grind is for money, but you can supplement that with real money. I know that sounds really bad in a world where every mobile game is a P2W nightmare, but it works for EVE. You cannot P2W EVE. Most people don't use real money, once you get to a point where you understand most of the game it's not really required. The only significant time sink Eve requires is learning how it works because it's an extremely complex game.
EVE has a really good Free to Play system in place and I definitely recommend checking it out.
I would not suggest getting an account then trying to throw a bunch of money at it until you really understand what that money is used for. We once killed a new 15 day old player who was flying high end implants that buffed their shields, in a ship that was armor tanked. In real money terms we probably blew up $40 that they were using completely incorrectly. There were 3 of us flying a total of less than $5 worth of real money ships. It's a very unforgiving game, but most players are nice to new players and we ended up giving that person a lot of advice on what they did wrong, what they can do to fix it, and which direction they needed to go to get better. We throw money at newbies often if we kill them, but since this one was flying several times more than our entire fleet we figured it was pointless. To put it into perspective, I've been playing for about 4yrs total spread across 14 and the most expensive thing I've flown cost about half as much as what this person was flying.
For the other payers: it was a full High-Grade crystal set in a blingy Apoc we found ratting in a Haven, so you know he was injected too. Almost 7b total on zkill.