Obviously it is good to do missions for skillboosts and I know it is a luxury that "veterans" didn't have
skillboosts are a small compensation for the lack of conditions for serious skilling. Back in the days we had the luxury of good conditions for skilling, which id prefer a 100 times more over skillboosts! From a veterans perspective i am happy i am through all the skilling that i have achieved back in the days. I pity the newbies a bit, because it has become a lot more expensive to skill up nowadays. On the other hand there is a great array of new weapons and items for newbies and midlevel players now, that have an enourmous advantage over the guns we used back then, especially in speed, low MU and high eco. (Bukin´s Blade, s10 fap, PBP-series for example)
I completed several of the iron quests including Araneatrox and Atrox and i am stuck in the thousands on pretty much all of them. When i did the quests i focused on evade and paramedic skills because they were way behind my hit and dmg skills and they started to move really slow in the 30s. In my point of view its not only money thorwn out of the window to aim for the big hit/dmg-related skill missions, it is also taking away the opportunity to skill something that make your weak skills catch up to the high ones. When a mission is done, its done, opportunity gone.
In my point of view the weakest relevant skill makes the hunter. Lets say you use a laser handgun for hunting close-combat-mob, the relevant skills are those which determine your hitlevel, dmglevel, evader and paramedic levels.
The problem is they do not go up with the same rate. When you reach level 10 hit, you might be level 8 dmg, level 5 evader and maybe only level 4 paramedic, depending on your choice of armor (bigger armor less faping). This picture will not change if you go up like this and "specialize" (worst word ever used from a MA official, and here is why), so when you reach level 100 hit, you gonna have level 80 dmg, level 50 evader and something about level 40 paramedic profession.
Big question now is, what level of a hunter are you now? Level 100? You cannot even use a level 100 gun! So you can handle a level 80 gun, because your damage level is 80. You are able to evade blows from a level 50 mob on a regular basis, but youre nowhere near evading blows from a level 80 mob on a regular basis. So how could you think, youre a level 80 hunter? And even worse, you cannot even outfap a level 50 mob´s damage, cause you are a level 40 paramedic only because of your fondness of big armors. How could you dare believe youre a level 50 hunter? So in this scenario the wannabe level 100 hunter should take a level 40 gun, fap, armor and go hunt a level 40 mob to get something like a full control of the situation with absolutely no bad surprises whatsoever. The example shows that naming hitlevels is not meaningful at all.
Sure you can hire a mod faper, borrow shadow from a friend and sib skill redeemer on Feffox Iron, but you should know better by now.
Back to the missions. So for me the weakest skill makes the hunter, i should say the weakest relevant profession level makes the overall performance. So this is what the missions are for, reducing weaknesses. This almost always means trying to raise your evader, paramedic and probably dodge level to anywhere near your hit and dmg levels. If you can afford it... so doing missions is probably the only way to really step up a "caste" (like from newbie to midlevel) by compensating the different growing rates of your relevant skills.
