Each season, starts with huge expectation, that brings old players back for at least the start, that not even myself think that it is the best part of season. Starting from zero, improvisation, exploring new game mechanics and locations, race for first town control, killing Rogues they are waiting in tanker to PK bluesuits... realy fun.
I think, that common denominator of start of season is effort to improve your base, your builds, your crafter's ability, your weapon, armor, ammo, drug storages = quality factor
There are gangs that reach this level very fast and after this, they need only to improve their quantity factor (more bases, more cars, more builds, more weapons,...).
Most of game economic balance mechanism was aimed to slow quantity factor (mining cooldowns, crafting cooldowns, NPC item respawn,..) and those, they were aimed to quality factor (i.e.: gaining crafter profession) were set to level, that you can have lvl. 3 crafter of any kind in few hours (because of crafters powerbuilding (10 int, skilled,...).
So my suggestion is very simple. I heard that you want to rework crafting and you want to implement some kind of schematics. So i think that you can extent season playability, if you (devs.) would create mechanism, that would enable acces to high tier weapon, armor and ammo progressively (step by step).
I.e.: first month, there would be possible to buy, craft only metal MK1 armors, second MK2 and tesla, third CA (basic), fourth upgraded CA and month before wipe, there could be possibility to craft somehow even Power Armor. Very same with weapons and ammo (no AP ammo for first few weeks,...).
The method could be variable: maybe some probability that will raise every day until someone will discover or find schema.
I.e.: 0,0000....?1 probability of that you will find that schema in encouter. After first one will found it, the prob. will raise vastly to other players and after some level, NPC traders will have ability to sell this stuff to players (so crafters would have advantage over "sell all crap, buy best stuff" kind of player traders).
There could exist trade among players and gangs (because gangs wants always best stuff), so even basic players/crafters could trade their best tier (at that moment) stuff to traders and it will again make reason why to start merchant roleplay again. (i can imagine real merchant guilds made by players). Players could also trade schematics itself, it could be great wars or thief missions to find and take schematics and it will add in game player vs player element and purpose. Players should choose gangs to trade and they could preffer non PK or PK if they want.
Other way is that GMs will manualy "relase" the possibility of finding those schematics, so no special mechanism needed.
Also, current state that you check drug effects, weapon and armor demands and you create powerbuild from scratch will become obsolete, because your super hyper powerbuilds would be unusable because of lack of adequate weapon, ammo, armor in that time.
