Please hear me out.
I think that, unless you are lucky enough to have a high-q soil spot, the new soil softcap on farming is very harsh.
As I understand, it is a square root function.
Meaning, that with my q20 soil I would need 500 farming skill to be able to farm q100 crops. Correct me if I'm wrong.
This got me thinking, and I've come up with the following:
Why not make the baseline soil quality (the lowest possible) raise by one point every day, and have the max of all soil nodes raise with it accordingly.
The people who have claimed high-q soil, will still be on top, and the people trying to farm on lower quality soil, will be somewhat more able to raise at least semi-decent quality over time.
H&H worlds generally don't last more than a few months, so I don't think this will lead to really excessive qualities at all.