If leveling was realistic, you would be able to level up as a you were actively using a skill. Then you would reach a plateau, where you could not level up any further, until you found a trainer to teach you more about the skill. Then you would take that knowledge and continue practice, leveling up once again. Then return to your trainer and so on...
wake up Volki
... you just described the system as it is now, the only difference I see from the current system (aside the way the GUI shows thing up) is you need to visit a trainer once every 10-20 levels instead of every single one.
rich players, assuming the economy was balanced, would imply that they got their monies via long amounts of playing either by professions or monster stabbing, which in the current system, means they'd also already have plenty of exp aka PP.
pp is therefore still useless given your reasoning. if they are rich, they'd still be able to power lvl whatever they want. but again, is that a bad thing? they put in hours upon hours of game time to get that much in the first place. why not reward them for their fruits of labor?
my personal issue with the system is the way it is displayed via the user display. way too crowded and busy, unintuitive, and terrible color choices.
you completely misunderstood the point of my reasoning. A rich player may create an alt, transfer an amount of money and have this alt maxed in no time, still the character belong to the player that spent a lot of time working and I could even agree with it, but the same thing can happen with other players up to a point where a single player or a small group of players could "monopolize" the server deciding the skill progression of other players and who is left behind.
A system where not only being rich (or having rich friends) is enough to max out skill but the time spent playing the game is rewarded as well seems to me overall better.
This doesn't mean the system we have is perfect, for example I would like a system where the character's stats could be risen by itself while players perform simple game actions like running, walking or chatting (thus eliminating the need of trainers for stats), unfortunately it's not that easy to do.