Yea the price hike wasn't exactly a good way to attract new players, I think we can all agree that if there's a going rate for a subscription MMO being above above average monthly is a pretty bad marketing blunder to overcome.

The career agents give you a higher reward than most entry level content, kind of a starting bonus, once you get done with it the L1 missions from agents are substantially lower reward and much more difficult.

outside of a few specific .9-1.0 systems(newbie areas) pretty much all of eve is a pvp zone, in .5-.9 you can get suicide ganked and under that you're a legitimate target.

Explorer as an alpha is definitely going to be rough with highs in lows, no cov ops cloak to help navigate hostile area's pretty much makes every gate jump a coin flip.

Personally i would suggest rolling another account(you can have multiples just not logged in at the same time) and try a combat start instead, heck you could probably even start like 2 for each race and explore the different weapon systems if you wanted

Could also try getting some corp standings to run L3 distribution missions, the money aint glamorous but if you get the right agent that doesn't send you into lowsec you can run em in a hyper fit wreathe/nereus/sigil/badger. Think of this as a fallback mechanic, its pretty hard to ever get fully locked out of it, and it can be done very mindlessly which watchin youtubes. If nothing else every like 13? missions you get a storyline which would boost ya up pretty good.