I think they should add  a option to customise the world like:

1.how strong will the monsters that spawn or how common mosters will spawn

2.how common or uncommon are the resources

3.how pricy are the npcs

4.how many minor factions will be or just a option to make it random (I have no idea what decide right now how many minor factions there will be)

bascily instead of letting the difficulty level of the world setup those things let the player setup it how he wants so you can have a world with a lot of resources and in the same time a lot of monsters coming at you to make your life harder