This entry follows on a bit from yesterday, both expanding and showing a consequence.

In Star Wars, and to be fair in any profession, it’s vanishingly rare to find a genius, a prodigy, who masters a difficult skill quickly. One could point to Karl Benz the engineer, or Alexander the Great as examples of people in our reality who have mastered difficult skills at a young age. In Star Wars likewise we see Luke Skywalker go from whiny farm boy to Jedi Knight in the space of a few years.
However, in each of those cases above their young start was followed by long years of experience and hard work to reach an end goal, some longer than others.

Let us not forget that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in his mid-twenties before promotion to Knight, and mid to late 30s before being made a Master. Even Anakin himself had 14 years of Jedi training to reach his position as a knight when he fell.

Linking in to yesterday, we find a situation where many writers start their characters young. This is a wise move, because the formative years of a person’s development are in the decade between 15 and 25. However, it’s then we start to see those drawbacks to timeline restriction.
It is my estimate that fully 75% of the Jedi and Sith Masters on SWRP are in that 10 year age bracket, certainly less than 30.
How this happens is completely natural and understandable. One writes a character as an Apprentice, and because promotion there is relatively swift since they usually start out knowing the basics only a year or so is judged to have passed. Then, however, we see the issues arise, since now we have a crop of very young knights, and active writers can have their knights promoted to Master very rapidly, less than 3 or 4 months real time.
And so we end up with the puzzling situation of 16 year old Jedi Masters, 18 year old Sith Lords, 19 year old Admirals and Senators, 20 year old Emperors and Grandmasters. Of course, there is always a prodigy, but when does the prodigy become the majority?

Is there a solution to this? Indeed, but it goes against some of the more fundamental concepts of player control. Simply mandating an age or IC time difference between promotions is a solution unlikely to appeal to everyone, and seems needlessly harsh.
So what is the solution in practice? None, probably. If people earn their rank, and the official timeline remains 3 years, then how can it be otherwise that people are Masters before 20? Perhaps a recognising of the issue and greater understanding would help though.

(If you are planning to post here replies with indignant ‘but I earned it’ or whatever else, do not fear, I was not identifying anyone in particular for this.)