Well... there's no reason you can't be a farmer and a soldier. Is there?
In your proposed learning by doing system, yes, there very much is. Unless they make it so you have to battle carrots to harvest them.
As for getting chars to demigod status without actually playing, don't forget that it takes a shitton of playing to actually get all those curios and cheese. If you can trick some suckers into doing it for you, then congratulations, you're a good player. One of the major point of the curio system was moving some of the reward away from pure mindless time investment to actual player skill. And what is a greater measure of player skill than the ability to play other people?
All this curio talk is, of course, neither here nor there, because Salem's curios are much different from H&H curios, and this was a Salem thread last I checked. The thing that stayed the same about curios, though, is the reward for shrewd PvP (in a broad sense, ie hustling rather than direct fighting).
Alts are an issue that is *never* going to go away, and an unavoidable part of a game that has both crafting and permadeath PvP. Splitting your investment between a crafter and the fighter characters is really the only logical thing to do. It would happen in any system you can possibly devise, and yes, it did happen in the old LP system too.