Balancing between early worlders and fresh people can be approached in 2 ways, sadly new joiners can just as well be alts of the early worlders and try-hards, no?
I believe the last time you approached this in ye new olde game, it boiled down to either letting ~X stat char only compete with ~X stat char, but letting people joining later catch up to ~X stats in a reasonable time frame.
or allowing for less than ~X stats compete with ~X stats in some way shape or form. Be it more people of low numbers can beat a titan, or a well played lower stat combat char could still deal some damage to a titan. As it stands I have no idea how well balanced pvp is, but I was under the impression a mob can mess up a single char potentially, as well as a titan being able to mess up someone less advanced than him or her gear wise and stat wise.
A few things allowed for skill to be a factor before, when escaping or fighting, and some of them have been cancelled out by the new ways to die nowadays. Die less on foot if you manage to hug speed boosts and carry all of the water, fail more if you meet a knarr in any sort of open water perhaps.
In terms of quality grind, you guys have already set up the world to allow for quick catch up as opposed to the direction Salem took after you guys gave it up.
Buy materials, start new industry in your own base with near 0 effort. Qualities aren't really location based save for ores and clay/water nodes perhaps.
LP wise, a new player just needs to, in my opinion, reach a relevant amount of LP to not feel entirely useless, and that's pretty doable given how many people are being nice with trades.
FEP wise, you really need to decide wether you're okay with diminishing returns being how you limit try hards, or perhaps time gating, or just general rebalancing of available foods. As it stands you have slammed all of the breaks on all of those fronts on progress. Foods are fairly bad hunger wise, kind of horrible satiation wise, and if you just keep stuffing your face everything is worse and worse. The hunger scaling with satiation thing is nice , if a roundabout fix, but while that might've helped newbies and worker chars, now we get longer satiations and a guarantee at needing bulk foods.
People that play actively will effectively need to either wait even longer to progress towards the older players, or produce more than they'd normally have to if they decide to park in the sweet spot of satiations, whichever that may be, where satiations restore as fast as you feel like eating.
I don't know where i'm going with this, but I'd sure like to see Jorb and Loftar re-evaluate the meta of their game, before trying to fix other stuff. Trying stuff out is great when compared to letting things be, but aiming changes more accurately at specific issues would be nice.