I used to play EVE Online for many years (unsubscribed 3 times, about 4+ total years of playing). It's a fantastically complex and rewarding game once you understand the mechanics. That initial first step though has to hurt them when trying to attract new players. They've made a ton of progress in making the game better for new players (especially getting rid of learning skills which essentially took about a month+ just to speed up learning other skills and if you didn't train those first you would fall way behind everyone else).

I'm not convinced this move is going to help them gain more players. New players will come into the game at a disadvantage now with a slower training rate. Training in real time is an interesting gimmick but one of the biggest barriers to the game (you can be the best pilot in the entire game with more money than everyone combined and you still can't fly any ships fancier than the tier 1 ships for usually several months let alone YEARS for some of the bigger ships like carriers).

Not going to like though this temps me to start-up my old account even if it is just so I can resume training skills that never finished.

Don't know a whole lot about Eve Online, but isn't the local currency (isk) linked to real currency due to the pay-to-play model? Will his affect the Eve economy?

There is, in that you can buy game time with ISK from a player who sells their game time for ISK. But all game time is still paid for in real money by someone, so there's never ISK entering or leaving the economy through this model.

As with other subscription games with a F2P option tacked on later, the F2P option is very, very restricted. A handful of available ship types and skills, and the skill limits heavily restrict how efficient you can be economically.

So I don't think there will be a lot of competition created by free accounts. But more players playing EVE will increase the overall ISK generation rate in the universe a little bit, so you might see some mild inflation.