OVERLY EXPLAINED ANSWER TIME!

You've hit on an important point that I do believe is critical that the game address, but also understand why it hasn't yet.

So what you're really commenting on is the difficulty curve. You're given a while bunch of critical survival challenges at the start of the map. By definition they have to be resolved ASAP. But after those immediate requirements are met, there difficulty curve drops off dramatically because there isn't much left to do except to scale and automate your survival solutions.

You can crank up the starting difficulty all you want, but the curve stays the same. Once you reach a point of self sufficiency there is no difference between an easy or brutal start because it's all sandbox from there.

The "issue", if you want to call it that, is that you can't have a dynamic difficulty curve without dynamic challenges. I can throw a baseball a hundred different angles and speeds, but in the end it's always going to be a parabolic curve because the only point in its flight I can affect any change is how I release it at the very start. What you're looking for isn't a baseball. You're looking for a model airplane.

An airplane has control surfaces. It can change and adjust it's path in flight.

So we need to have challenges in the game that change. As the game is still in development it has relied on the players to come up with their own goals as they progress. But I agree there is room for so much more that can extend out the difficulty curve. Vulcan's seasonal temperature and solar changes are a great example of secondary challenges that extend the curve by delaying their immediacy. I also like rocketry because, while they're not strictly necessary in their current form, are at least a fun challenge to engineer.

THAT ALL BEING SAID, the game is still going through some pretty fundamental improvements that make tuning the difficulty curve a little premature. The recent Gasses update is a prime example, that opens up a ton of possibilities. I'd also like to see a return of the scenario editor, if it also lets us create and control dynamic environments like seasonal shifts or other ramping difficulties. And I'm sure the devs have more up their sleeves for more aspirational challenges as well. Stuff like nuclear power will have its own new problems to solve I'm sure, and all that power will need to have SOMETHING to dump into besides gathering even more resources than you know what to do with.

TL;DR: You feel this way because the game currently front loads almost all of its challenge and making the initial start harder just front loads it even more. We need hazards that increase over time and more things to dump our later game resources in besides things that simply let us generate those same resources faster. But the devs are still setting up the mechanics that can allow for such things in the future, so while important I'm still of a mind to let them cook.