Sure it won't help with personal skills/knowledge progression, but it allows to skip a huge part of the game with all the newbie activities, other than mining stuff, and at the same time makes all the credits, economy, etc completely meaningless.
I do agree that it is a big skip button, but a newbie will remain a newbie without skills and knowledge. Example: I have an engineered ship and even I think twice before accepting a "Assassinate Pirate Lord wing mission", a newbie in a A rated Anaconda will probably not survive. 3 things to take from that.
1: The learning curve becomes a learning Cliff, except you have to climb it.
2: Having the credits will just give someone a false (and yet literal) sense of security.
3: There was no need to do the mission in the first place because money.
It does make credits useless to a degree. If a player is happy to sit there and fly a big ship then so be it. Eventually they will either get bored and have to start playing Elite. Somewhere down the line they will either stop playing or they will have to find a purpose to keep playing.
Believe it or not, lets use the engineers as an example...Every activity in Elite has to be done to unlock most if not all those glorified mechanics. Combat bonds, black market, exploration, trading, mining (for painite), combat (materials or rank), missions (Reputation or modular terminals) and that's all I can think of, all those activities will be required to progress down that line.