The above is a solution to the ever annoying, reputation-killing issue of players joining harsh seasons. Atop of that, setting Autumn to be the default season in the server select menu, instead of any might help a newbie or teo as well, since people who are new to the game tend to not look at those before joining a server.
All that said, lets get to the main point of this topic. Giants. And for that matter possibly other content that would be great as consequential but isn't, for reasons like people wanting to feel like they've beaten the game ages ago instead of a new challenge coming to pull the strings like RoG and SW initially did and because "this could be very bad for newbies who can't deal eith them".
There are currently only 2 bosses that go after the players within the game, namely Bearger and Deerclops. The former you can always place in some random biome you never visit and leave him there to be for the rest of the game since his loot isn't all that important and he will stay put if undisturbed. And besides, you can get more out of his loot if you leave him alive and just dance around with him for a little while. Deerclops on the other hand is very different.
To my knowledge, he has a high detection radius of structures and he targets them well. Players too. And his loot is quite userful or even importantly so as well as the fact that you actually have to kill him to get it.
Regardless, these two giants, especially the Deerclops are a nuisense to newbies. Why? Because their spawn targeting and spawn timing is based off of global day count, meaning a day 1 player, who is stuck at the portal could have Deerclops going after him just because they're near the most structures, whilst everyone else is fighting Drsgonfly over yander (that **** literally happened to me once). This kind of mechanism is bull****tery. There is currently only one type of time based attack mechanic that is done reasonably well and that is hounds; their mechanics are set local to groups of players or local to each player based on how many days they have survived and not how long the world has existed. This kind of mechanic is essential for not forcing newbies of day 1 or 2 to fight something that is clearly out of their league if they're without someone who's lived longer on the server or completely alone on the server.
So, as you might tell, my solution is to make giants' spawn mechanics and for anything that has global difficulty to be set to local. This would solve so many problems on such a scale... Think about how many "how to deal with [giant's name]" threads you've seen pop up throughout the time vs how many "how to deal with hounds" threads you've seen. For me, the former is more than I could count and the latter is that I can't recall a single one even vaguely. And a lot of it, I'm sure, has to do with local day count mechanics being present instead of global.
Newbies may still experience late game challenges, although they would at least initially need to be near someone who has been there for longer.
Making giants spawn based on local day count survived for each player at global times when they would normally spawn is essential if we're going to have bosses like Dragonfly or Toadstool with some form of roaming mechanics (not suggesting them losing raid mechanics, simply that at times they could leave their bases to go and roam around near a player with a high enough day count to mess up their day).
I believe Tree guards also are based on global day counts and have 0% chance of spawning within the first 3 global days. Make that first 3 local days, because it is otherwise unfair that a newcomer chops down their second tree on day one and the tallest tree guard is already after them.
Remember, Klei, you did pretty darn well with hound attack mechanics, so how about applying the same to everything else? It will mean the game won't get a bad rep of being colossally unbalanced (although it very much is right now, but nothing that can't be changed) and people might have some more incentive to help players out, instead of going to the portal, supplying them every time with everything you have for them to only leave and never come back with some pretty hard-to-obtain-in-huge-amounts stuff and then newbies getting hate for being bad from other players and telling them to git gud, when the whole idea of the game is to cooperate no matter how bad you are at the game instead of trying to push for them to play on their own until they get better so they are "worthy" to play with others. Because honestly, joining the game and instantly being presented with a near-impossible challenge is the type of crap NMS did with its survival mode and guess what, that mode turned out to be quite unbearably trashy.