Good post. Touches at the root of some of the problems in this game but I'm not sure I agree with you on what those problems are.
The concept of the game is supposed to be about survival and then developing societies of gradually more complexity. That stat and quality grind are so integral to the gameplay is I think somewhat of an error, but unfortunately is continually supported by updates which seem to be fire fighting control of the system rather than dealing with the fundamental problems of it. The speed at which you reach the various caps you talk of is of course dependant on the hours of gameplay put in, This I think is one of the greater issues, that this game rewards the player so much for either being sat in front of a computer for an unreasonable amount of time or else using bots to aleviate some of that requirement in order to compete with other players, as such I think that slowing down some of the progression would be appropriate. The formation and development of societies is hampered atm by the amount of influence of the current large factions, who can basically lock out everyone else from day 1 because the player base is not large enough to organise decent competetion, new people getting into the game is hampered by the crazy amount of mechanics and abuses of mechanics you have to learn and fast travel allows factions to put their foot on the throat of other players on the opposite side of the world to prevent them developing, in fact if you are not going to play along with the major factions you are better off staying as insignificant as possible to avoid being perceived as someone who needs to be eliminated. All this is unhealthy imo.
I think most of the community would agree that bone nodes are currently ridiculous and need significant rework, I have argued about this elsewhere but basically I think it was better in legacy when the best you could get to work with was a Q200 bear bone and all bears were the same until domestic bones were increased in quality. It is reasonable that all bears had (at least roughly) the same quality bones imo. Travelling the world to find high quality bones and then having to grind those bone nodes for crazy numbers of them to raise industry is just ridiculous. I am all for domestic bones being a more significant factor again and thus slowing this process down to the speed of domestic meat and farming development; Doing that would immediately affect most industry in the game and would put qualities in a bracket more consistant with the quality bonus formula, ie maybe you wouldn't jump directly to what.. *4/5 multiplier but would spend some time on 2 and 3 for some things.
Damaging metal spiralling the way they have is good progress I think but hasn't gone far enough. IMO cast iron should be excluded from the possibility to increase in quality full stop, allow one increase and that's it, and then reasonably competative metal is achievable by all with a reasonable level of time input.
Another major problem is that the current large factions, being a significant and vocal part of the playerbase, understandably want to keep their stranglehold on the game and thus are always pushing for mechanics that perpetuate it. I feel also that devs pander to them somewhat.