A little messy, but you got the situation right, above all when it comes to the open world.

You can't pk even a guy to protect a spot you were on, if you don't accept it, you'll be on the losing side in any case. 

On the other hand, you can be the worst player, ksing various players endlessly for hours without any penalty. 

Beautiful, right? 

You don't have to go all in on everything. You can try to find a balance between tedious and boring and rewarding for knowledge and planning. I kind of liked the old system but I'm not sure if that's just because how I'm used to it being or if it was actually good gameplay but you're being disingenous if you act like there no upsides to players for implementing the new system just because you don't like it. It is not inherently rewarding to have to spend your life constantly referencing a wiki to make sure you are in the right area for some exact correct mat.

Also as far as the "too many items" thing, I agree, there are a lot of pointless items that should be removed from the game. However, that doesn't mean that a lot of the current item diversity for materials leads to false complexity since most of them become useless and only a minority actually hold value.