Swamps is the first major difficulty spike in the game, but not the only one. Trying to find the plains boss can seem like trying to find a needle among several haystacks sometimes (or you can get super lucky and find an altar in the first huge plains you find, never know). If you don't mind "cheating" then the map option can be a great one for you. You could leave it set to only show you biomes so you can target a larger swamp without completely removing the exploration aspect, or you can outright have it tell you where the crypts and boss altars should be instead.

If you still want to do this entirely legit, sail east-west for now. North and south may see you finding swamps as well, but also increase your chances of finding biomes you can't really do anything with right now. There's a good chance you could be sailing for a bit before you find a decent sized swamp that is also relatively safe to make your way into (finding a proper swamp can be a pain already, finding one that happens to be near a meadows you an make a nice cozy forward base in is just slightly harder than that). If you do find swamps, even the small ones, keep an eye out for ruins. Ruins can also sometimes contain that stone i can never spell right that tells you where that biomes nearest boss altar is, and a swamp with a bonemass altar is almost always large enough to have several crypts in it as well, so even the tin swamps can help you find a good swamp sometimes.

As far as potentially skipping swamp/bonemass, it might technically be possible but it'll make your life a whole lot harder, and you'll almost certainly want one of the AoE groundsmash weapons (stagbreaker is the first, Iron sledge is the version you can get around swamp tier) to compensate. They don't make the best actual weapons because of their slow swing, but that ground-pound attack both those weapons do can reveal underground deposits to you, which is a feature you may need without the item bonemass drops. it could also help you get some iron from swamps that dont have crypts either, but don't expect to get a whole lot quickly with this method. The basic principle is you run around the area that may have hidden ore, and use the ground pound attack. If you see it tick "too hard" for damage with nothing visibly apparent to explain it (like ancient trees will also show as "too hard" for these weapons), start digging. That "too hard" that pops up is what reveals the underground ore node for you to find just slightly easier. Same principle can be applied to mountain and it's hidden ore, but you are going to need some iron for pretty much all of the good stuff in game (including the large boat you can eventually make that will make these kinds of trips a lot less stressful).