Mothership 1E Ditched Levels (Which is a Shame)

I have a rant about Mothership. Here it goes...starting with a regression to Traveller:

For better or worse, Traveller 2nd Edition and prior editions have a long history of front-loading your character's skill history into the terms you serve before you retire in middle age and decide to go adventuring. Traveller is all about spacemen resolving a midlife crisis through adventure, essentially.

Mothership 0E, however, was a game about frightened average Joes out on a routine job discovering horrifying alien threats. The average Mothership character is someone generally early in their professional career in Traveller terms, suddenly thrust into a deadly limelight and having to build instincts to survive and learn.

Mothership 1E, however, got some notion going that levels are too gamey for it and decided to go with a more Travelleresque approach, one in which you can improve skills through learning and cash over time. The problem is its a pretty simplistic and arbitrary approach, and as a result feels just as gamey as levels did, because under this system, as an example, getting good at something like firearms takes 4 years of study--not because anyone in their right mind thinks it really takes that long, but because that's how long an expert skill takes.

I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that sure, when you choose to analyze a system in a game, it can and will come off as gamey. The question is: does the system serve a good purpose toward the type of game and story you are telling? And the answer is that yes, leveling as a mechanic does serve that purpose, but inconceivably long periods of training time do not. In the former, your characters can semi-organically grow with experience, and you could refine the level process if you so desired to let the improvements reflect the type of experience gained (if you want to drill down enough for that level of granularity). But the other system will arbitrarily restrict the chance of growth in skills and learning to a much smaller percentage of gamers, those who play Mothership like a long-term multiyear campaign with characters who aren't at near constant risk of death and therefore somehow have time to train for 2 to 6 years. I don't know who's running the game like that, sorry.

What Mothership 1E needs is both systems: a training mechanic (and the save improvement through shore leave mechanic) and a leveling reward system that identifies that the stuff the characters are actually doing at that moment in play is what actually matters to the game and experience, not "set your PC aside for 6 years to do nothing so you can improve." Alas, I don't get involved in development on stuff, I generally trust those in charge to make good choices, but I feel like maybe this was a missed chance to let the devs of Mothership know that whoever told them a slower system of advancement for their fast-passed horror game was a good idea were maybe not speaking for all of us? 

Well, there's a huge 3PP community out there for Mothership, maybe one of them will (or has) hacked the level mechanic back in. I know I'm awarding "skill points" that can go toward skill improvement in my game. No one is ever going to learn the good stuff otherwise, and I am not going to restrict myself to boring, slow games where survival is paramount just to aid them in growth; that's what Traveller is for.