This is the best game I have played in all my life. All I can say is join a corp and make them teach you. You'll love it
1. skill system: you don't need to kill millions or stupid goblings to level up. This type of system requires you to be always on. Eve skill system keep's going even when your logged off.
2. the death penalty is not easy to deal with. If you lose a ship you lose it. No "WoW" type of death where you get everything back. Nope not here. your ship blows up you lose it permanently. But theres lots of way to get it back...easy ways of course (ie: missions for one)
3. Awesome community. The best advice I will give is JOIN A CORPORATION in eve. Sure some have certain requirements and new players will be left out sometimes because there new but work hard to get in a corp and you will be able to learn about the game with other members. Its a great social community which always gives advice. Yup, theres always some people that act like d*cks too lmao.
4. graphics: Not the best ones but its really pretty and this time it uses shader 2.0 and always updates it when they can. Possibly next year or this one CCP will make an update for shader 3.0 so in other words, more shinyness in Eve yayyyy.
5. sounds: true, it sucks, same music since I began but its in space..what do you expect anyway, not a lot but the quality is good though that I can say.
6. menus and interface. true, we can't mod it like some games but CCP is going there slowly but surely. All I can say in this one is you can snap the windows where you want too so thats a really good thing.
7. Social and game play.: Mhhh, missions, pvp, exploration and lots more to do. All I can say is complete the tutorials inside the game and then join a corp. That way you'll have more fun and it will be less frustrating.
Thats it.
All I can say regarding this is that when people hate the game and give bad reviews its usually because they didn't join the right corporation. Why the corp thing again. Think of it that way: if you join a pvp group and you hate doing pvp, you'll find it frustrating and up to a point you will probably think of quitting.