I am a relative newcomer myself, and I don't think the game needs to be made more accessible to newcomers than it already is.
Some background: I started playing cRPG during the time of the second to most recent steam sale for Warband. Like many, I was extremely horrible when I started; unlike many, I recognized the most important deficiency was not in the equipment I was using but the player using the equipment. Although I did not join a clan, as that's not my thing, what I did do was seek advice from better players who could tell me what I was doing incorrectly, try different weapons to see what was to my tastes, and spent a lot of time practicing on the duel server. I now have 6 generations under my belt between. I cannot say that I am a truly good player by any stretch of the imagination, but I can say that I'm not a below average one by cRPG standards anymore, which in turn makes me better than most of the people playing Mount and Blade. What am I getting at here?
What I'm getting at is that climbing a mountain pays off when you get to the point where you can turn around and take in the view. Dumbing things down, making them unnecessarily easy, and holding the players' hands is contrary to what makes the mod enjoyable, appealing, and worth playing, and I see no reason to cater to people who do not have the patience to raise themselves out of the mire. This extends, in my view, not just to the gameplay mechanics themselves but also the meta stuff like managing your upkeep and knowing how much gear a given multiplier can support; I learned these things precisely because I started out with no gold, and I feel it would be ultimately detrimental to the learning process of a newcomer if he magically started with thousands of gold (despite being a peasant) for no reason other than the fact that he's new.
