Emotional investment in a ship has little to do with the harshness of death, for me at least. Granted, everyone gets attached to their ships in some way or another, but my favorite ship at a given time is usually one of my least expensive.

Getting blown up in Eve, golden rules or no golden rules, is compounded by a few things - pride, the nature of Eve's economy, implants, and the staggering number of ships and fittings. That said, it's definitely a must to always have an updated clone, and 9 times out of 10 necessary to have your ship insured. Never flying a boat 'you can't afford to lose' is wise adage, but problematic. As you amass skills, you buy increasingly expensive ships and modules to capitalize on those skills. Even assuming your income increases, it rarely increases proportionately to your best available ship. Take a battleship for instance. A fitted battleship can cost upwards of 500 million ISK, and no matter how rarely you fly it, it's almost impossible to account for the amount and type of bullshit you'll encounter (depending on where you fly it). My point is, at some juncture or another, it's near inevitable that you'll lose a ship that won't at least hurt financially. Add to that how much of a massive chore it is to re-assemble your ship (flying from system to system snagging modules and rigs at their lowest prices) and how much prices fluctuate in the economy, and losing a ship that is anything more advanced than a cruiser sucks pretty large.

Death, as in being podded, is the next level of shitiness. Not only do you have to pay for expensive-ass implants all over again, but until buy them and plug them in again, dropping dozens of millions of ISK in the process, your skill training is losing days (possibly even weeks) of precious time.

Sometimes, just the being podded in and of itself is an act so offensive and personal that it makes your death that much more of a monitor-chucker. I've had otherwise decent nights ruined by some dick in lowsec podding me out of nowhere in my totally harmless, totally unarmed, totally empty, totally pointless-to-destroy hauling boat. As an added mood-harsher, sometimes you even get the pleasure of receiving an unsolicited, obnoxious, and gloating evemail from the dick-in-a-box that blew you up for no reason. Retribution is sometimes frustratingly difficult to arrange, or just flat-out impossible. Don't get me wrong, I love low and null sec, and I understand that while PvP is an integral part of the game, honor isn't. But that doesn't mean that if some dink that's been playing since 2003 takes a dump on your cruiser in his Tech 2 battleship just because he can it doesn't sting.

As for walking in stations, I'm excited and curious, but I'll opine at length in the early morning when I can actually try it out. Plus, pretending I don't have to work tomorrow morning and leaving a comment this long (that 3, maybe 4 people will skim) is really dumb.