I would assume that the target segment for solo mining would be the players that might otherwise be enjoying programming the flight management system of a newest generation airliner, and then watching the autopilot perform the actual flight for hours in some flight simulator. All they would have to do was to communicate with the ground stations and other pilots, and eventually inputting some updated data to the flight management system for it to reconfigure the autopilot.
In eve, you call it “be on coms”, and while the air traffic controler, or his MMO counterpart, would advice pilots in the area of his responsiblity of poor weather or traffic, explorers and pvp-ers would advice the miner of perils inbound.
New players will run NPC missions. After the 16th mission the ran at the same faction, they will be sent an ingame mail telling them some NPC has some very urgent buisness, and if this NPC agent is talked to, the agent will ask the player to mine some resource. With some experience in the game, you’ll be going to one of the regional markets to buy the requested resource, but as a new player, you jump into the venture you were given in the tutorial and go mine the ore you were asked for instead.
Talking about understanding how mechanics work, there’s a huge number of 10+ years “eve veterans” that live in nullsec and hate highsec, but in fact, they don’t understand the concept of suspect / criminal states or how gates work.
“I’ve never understood how subcap pvp works” is one of my favorite quotes.
The tutorial quests can be done independent of each other, and you can opt not to run some carreer’s quests. You can complete the exploration tutorial without having mined, though I don’t remember whether you’ll be asked to huff gas as part of the wormhole introduction.
It’s important to know how mining works on the long run, though, because you need to properly mimic a miner if you want to bait some content with a mining ship. For some better content, you might even have to mimic a mining fleet (t3c hunters won’t hotdrop on a single barge, they just kill it with the hunter and move on)
They do it because they’re greedy to the last bit. You can make silly amounts of ISK by buying belt ores (or materials), moon materials, PI, Gas, BPCs, …, from players in Jita, Rens, or elsewhere and researching, reacting, manufacturing, or all of it.
But of cause, you can make even more income if you “offer” your newbros the service to buyback the ores they mine for 90% Jita in some null, while you don’t offer them access to the reproc module, so it’s 90% ore rather then compressed ore, and they don’t have a realistic choise to not give you the ore but use it themselves, either. In the next moment, you offer the newbro some “doctrine” fitting at 150% highsec trade value, which you built out of the ore that you got from your newbros. Ah, don’t forget the moon mining tax, please.