The miracle of trailers. They can make the game look so goddamn exciting, the fleet battles looked absolutely sweet and its hard not to go "Holy shit! That looks awesome I wanna fly around in that and shoot things down!!!"
And then you get into the game and after 500~ hours of spreadsheet combat you get rewarded with this.
Clusterfuck 3000 of Space Battles.
I really, really wish I could get into this game. It is such a wonderful world that is player driven, all the drama, all the intrigues, the diplomacy, the backstabbings, all scams but CCP has just done it so, damn, hard. I still try every 8 or so months to play again to see if I have reached a critical mass where I finally can like it, but I never get past a small battlecruiser before it explodes and I reset back to destroyers. People tell me it is easy to get money and replace ships but I never seem to reach that magical point where I somehow would earn 50 million a day. 500.000 is a miracle for me if I can earn it on a daily basis, some days I might get lucky and find some junk I can sell for a million.
Still, at the end of the day, their trailers kick ass.
For reference, I have 4 accounts, one trader/manufacturer, one combat only, one combat/mining and one noob account that I want to play with PvP on. I have no spreadsheets at all (I do see you said combat).
The more interesting combat for me does come from flying the smaller ships where you are up close and personal, but that's each to their own. You do need to be at the right range, you do need to be firing on the correct target, you do need to be using the correct ammo. It really isn't "click the button and hope he dies first" because if you do that you are almost always going to lose. It could probably be more "launch quantum torpedos, full spread" exciting but I don't know how they would do it without making it simpler, short of adding a fighter pilot type view for the smaller ships.
As for making money, I do Incursions on my 7m SP character (thats about 6 months training) and earn 9m isk every 8-9 minutes, after a 10% corp tax. I'm not even very good at it and we only do the n00b ass 9-11 player ones. Some go up toward 50 with better rewards.
I also do missions that will pay out 20m or so in bounties in 30-45 minutes. Again, not very good at them compared to others but the money is easy.
It all depends on what you are trying to do, how you are trying to do it and how long you can do it for. Eve can be played entirely solo if you want, but it really does reward being in a corp with people that can help out and gang up with.
Regardless of anything, Eve isn't for everyone. I stopped playing for over 5 years but for the life of me I can't remember why. Really enjoying being back at the moment.