At the end, I'm going to ask what you think. Before that here's the pitch.
With the release of Lord of the Rings Online, and later Star Trek Online, as well as the ever increasing popularity of WoW the MMO genre is populated (polluted?) with a whole range of titles set in different genres, but mainly sadly fixed firmly in the medieval/fantasy setting.
Setting and storyline aside, there's one very very important aspect to ALL MMO's whatever your favourite and that is the leveling system used.
In 2003 CCP released Eve Online. Today Eve Online is still not that mainstream, but it's groundbreaking above one reason. Skill books are bought and trained, offline or online. You can even switch your skill being learnt to something else without losing time either.
As far as I'm aware, this is the only game that offers offline character advancement.
Lord of the Rings, follows WoW's character levelling to the letter. Do this to get better at that, repeat. Get to a level and use better equipment, to do it faster, but by that stage levelling takes longer so you're going to have to do a whole lot more to see your level rise.
I have no details on how STo will work, hopefully it will be realtime enabled, not just game time, otherwise it's just the same Grindfest that I despise, simply because I don't have the time to get to grind x for more than a couple of hours a day.
To balance this out, Skill books in Eve must be purchased. This requires the hoarding of ingame currency. So whatever you enjoy doing in the game to make money a pretty good investment is the next skill book to increase your characters potential. The market is so much better than any other online game as well, but that's a different blog yet to be written.
So what method do you prefer? Have you not experienced the real time skilling that Eve offers? Would the method put you off from trying a new MMO? As much detail/opinion as possible. I'll check out what STO looks likely to be offering and will put my whole support behind the real time offline method.