Yes, skipping the basic flying lessons works. But you're still forced to play through the introductory colony, terraform, SETI, etc. missions, even though you already know how all of it works. If you choose to ignore those missions the game still expects you to go through them. You can't really do anything besides fly around aimlessly until you finish all the missions.

Additionally, colonies are so expensive that the only way you can afford to build them in the beginning is to do missions for alien races. The game kind of shoves you out into interstellar space whether you want to go there or not.

Again, I really don't want to gripe about the game - I'm loving it. It just seems a bit overly set in telling you what you need to do, instead of just letting the player decide.