EVE's economy is quite interesting, to the point where actual economists have studied it and the devs eventually hired some economists to work for them to try and help judge how changes they make to the game are going to affect the economy.

As for where the money comes from, it actually all comes from NPCs, players can't actually create money on their own. There are NPC seeded buyers and sellers of many items in the game but the majority of buying and selling is done by players. The majority of the money comes from mission runners and NPC bounties. The money is spread out from there. And while you can (and many people do) mine for minerals to make a lot of products, the majority of those products are then sold for money and not traded for other products.


As for the original topic travel times aren't fun. They just aren't, no one likes just traveling. A lot of people might like looking around and exploring areas they haven't seen. They might like random encounters. And traveling might make seeing stuff like that more common, but the people that like doing that will do that even if they aren't forced to long travel times.
Besides, 30 minutes isn't anywhere near "meaningful" or "realistic" travel times compared to real life. Even contemporary travel with a vehicle, 30 minutes of driving can get me to one other city and from there it is another hour before we get to anything else. By horse or bike that would be much closer to an hour trip with other cities, especially any of any size, would be full day trips (getting to a big city takes about 2.5 hours going at 75mph most of the time).

And while it is true that *now* you can go into some parts of the world and probably walk or ride a horse for a day or two and never leave urban areas, that is only actually possible because with cars we can move goods much farther and faster. You simply couldn't keep a city like Los Angels in a livable state if you couldn't move large amounts of goods hundreds or thousands of miles in a day or two.

Any realistic pre-industrial travel is limited to people with a lot of free time or people with a very large need to go somewhere. Even farmers with produce to sell wouldn't be making the trip between towns every single day. If you "only" had 2 hours to play a day and were going with realistic travel times, you could easily spend 1-2 weeks of playing doing nothing but walking from one small farming town to the next only slightly different small farming town. And probably not running into much of anything along the way, because if you were wandering off the path that same trip might take 2-3 weeks instead.