My own point of view is that the problems are caused by a number of factors, but the issues that stick out are the research and (old) production systems (I don't know the new production system). I joined the game with a large number of Eve players, and our intention was to run an essentially capitalist corp.

The initial plan was do to NPCing / Mining / Whatever, make money and buy mods. Making money was pretty easy, finding mods and bots to buy was much harder. At this point a lot of players started to look at manufacturing but hit the problem of not having any research and so not having access to prototypes (Good Luck buying those on the market). So they all started farming and buying kernels and got some T2/3 research but it doesn't really end up making them any money, since ppl want T4 gear.

After discussion (and some arguing) we decide that if we want to make T4 available for our members, we need one prototyper to feed all the kernels too and we start working to that. We skill up a few ppl to do Indy stuff and start making stuff. It turns out with all the stuff you have to do (source multiple materials, do T1-3 production and then T4), that just producing for a single corporation is a lot of work, and so guess what, we become another internal market, centralised production corp only producing for members.

The point is, that is not what we wanted to do, but the way the game works in regards to research and production basically forced us in that direction.