Just for some perspective, the developers love playing at every stage of the game. They love the primitive stage and then spending time with iron tools and being weak and vulnerable and then becoming more powerful through perks, armor, weapons, and bases. The developers love the idea that unless actively defended there is a risk that a base can be breached and you have to fall back and perhaps abandon.
Nobody on the dev team rushes to try and skip "the boring early stuff" so they can get all the best things in the first week or two.
So if your play preference is to quickly progress because you can't stand the grind of the using brown stone tools for more than a day and you like to rush to the top stuff, then you are going to have mod out the level gates, and increase the xp gains, and increase the loot % from zombies, and whatever else you want to have fun because it's not so much that they are transitioning to an rpg froma survival sandbox as they are very interested in making every stage of the game they have designed signficant and something to be experienced rather than skipped.