It's good and bad.
Saves you a lot of headaches with some skills but it's hardly "playing the game" to just sit in your house and use a skill every X minutes. I usually work all my RoT skills at once, and just take myself out of commission from actually playing on random days.
I could 120 combat skills far, far before RoT allows it, but without RoT I'd have gone insane working up poison (in the beforetimes, I hear you can gain by actually fighting now).