you need to generate an income in EVE to do anything. there are lots of other ways to make isk. I usually rat or manufacture. is this not the case in Elite: Dangerous?
You start out with a small but fun and useful ship, the Sidewinder and 4,000cr iirc. Long post warning! Yes you can do things, combat, mining, missions, smuggling, pirating, can all be done pretty early on in the game. I was able to get into bounty hunting within my first couple hours quite easily.
Not much, but you can pick up missions at no cost to you, delivery/courier missions. You earn rep for the party that you do missions for in that system, they eventually offer navy/military missions, you can work your way up.
You can work up and buy different ships, weapons, shields, hulls, scanners and more. You can trade and adjust your ship loadout for that. You can go on bounty hunting missions, either from station missions or of your own accord. You can be a pirate and plunder trade routes and mining hot spots.
Sure to get the big ships and better weapons, you need funds, but to start out and do things such as missions, combat, etc, you don't need much. It can be pretty easy to earn 100k+ hr, which for early game is PLENTY.
Work with a few friends and join their Wing, and you can share in the wealth and know someone has your back on a mining run or trade route.
You can play in different modes, so if you want to play alone and don't want to worry about players bugging you, play in solo mode, then its you vs ai. Or play in online and take more risks. The universe is affected equally by both sections of the game, as neither is offline.
I ran a lot of missions and would go to the Nav Points at stars with my combat-oriented Eagle, scan for wanted ships and take them out. Go collect bounties. I worked up to a Cobra MkIII pretty easily. My friends went miners in their early game, and enjoyed it for a little bit, but the mining in this game is tedious...they're supposed to be fixing that and I hope they do.
I could go on more...I really do enjoy this title. Yes there are billionaires and it's hard for most to get to that level, and yes some ships and upgrades are stupid expensive. I enjoy my Cobra (bounty hunting/combat) and T6 (trading) for what I do atm. I'll get a bigger, better, badder ship sometime in the future, but I'm enjoying what I do until I get there instead of forcing myself into the grind.
The complaints you read are legit and justified, but the way I play it doesn't bug me. Plus if I do get bothered I go play SC alpha. Though I enjoy Elite's combat more. And the audio in this game is amazing!