Once upon a time, there was no skill queue at all. It was a thing begged and wished for in the forums. This made those first few days of life as a new player quite hectic - all your skills finish in an hour or two and you likely missed out on many hours a day the first week of training unless you had no life outside of eve (quite a demand for a new player).

As you played, you would time your skills so that they would finish in the right timeframe for playing (evemon has the ability to show this - it was critical then) or toss on the 5 day skill you are training for before you log off and train the 2h skill while you play.

The main thing that CCP was concerned about was the train and forget characters. Toss a character in with a years worth of skills and 'ghost train' it (let the subscription expire but continue training). It was something quite doable back then.

And so, we now have a skill queue. However it comes with the bit that you can't queue anything to start after 24 hours from now. All things considered, it is better than it was.

If you can't reliably play this week, train one of those 20 day skills. Getting Drone Interfacing V or Battlecruisers V is quite nice.

That's just the mechanic's of the system at the moment. I think if CCP allowed for training time according to your subscription time, there would be a huge amount of "set it and forget it" pilots, reducing the amount of people logging in daily. Even though CCP still gets their money, it may be something they want to avoid, no matter how convenient it will be for subscribers.

I didn't know that was the case. As far as I know, your skillqueue will "train" for as long as your account is being paid. If you stop paying, then your skill will stop working when your paid time expires.