Originally posted by SeeFights:

i just feel like having the tutorial so much easier (i understand it is meant to be easy but not too easy) is just a bad representation of the game (for me anyway)

Like take example your statement about cooking, to get the best foods you need the cauldron, the cauldron doesnt provide the best of the best but its enough, for this you need bronze, you get bronze where? oh yes the death forest.

Okay fermenting lets make potions...oh you need bronze -_-

See what im getting at?

The game requires you to go there as its natural progression but it just throws so many things at you it doesnt do the tutorial justice, i didnt even know parrying was a thing OR how to do it until like my 25th hour in...

All games with tutorials don't represent accurately the rest of the game. See Modern Warfare games for example. In the tutorials you have to shoot cutouts that don't shoot back.
Meadows are the "safe biome" of the game. A place where you know that, aside from pesky mobs that will bother you, there's no danger. It's the place where it's safe to build, safe to run back to and safe to land when sailing so it will never represent what the rest of the biomes are. If there's a difficulty jump somewhere I'd say it's from the forest to the swamp because of the status effect and the terrain.

Regarding food and progression it's very MMOish and I don't like it either but that's how gear check mechanics work. It's linear. In biome 1 you'll find a very specific set of gear and food but it won't be the best of the game because on biome 2 you have new gear and food. Same for biome 3 and so on and so forth. Enemies are the same, once you get gear from biome 4 greydwarves from biome 2 will be harmless.