I kind of get the feeling...

[Achelexus]

Well it's way better to gate these things behind Town Ranks than time.

Oh my gosh yes. Or Farming Tips.

I just wish the pickler machine was that way, too. Ah well, I can make sashimi for Hinata, at least.

Unfortunately a lot of these "gated behind time" thing is still... unbalanced.

A lot of tool upgrades require oyster pearls, which you can't really get before the second year(unless you get really lucky with festival wins, even then you probably won't have enough.)

You can't harvest honey until the second year, too, which locks you out of a lot of recipes.

Etc.

[Kikki]

hrm... this might be a bit of a spoiler so if you want to know later town link rank unlocks stuff...

Spoiler:

apparently at the lock before becoming b rank each town wants some crops from another town... however you can only get those crops from a D or C rank town... like i'm at west town lock and it calls for 20 sweet potato from tsuyu(i guess 50 on the other mode) and i've heard one of the other town b locks requires crops from another town with the same numbers.

Just a little note on that in case anyone wants to choose Seedling to make requirements easier...you might be disappointed depending on what you think you get with Seedling. You get reduced shop prices and increased stamina, and that's it. (Which is pretty great, by itself, imo.) There's no difference between the modes in what is required for town links or farm tips...seedling doesn't make it any easier there except that if you need to buy something from a shop to do it, it'll be cheaper. When residents ask for money to complete something for a town link lock project or etc, that is not reduced, either. Only the prices on things you can buy in a store. So if you require shipping or donating 20 Insert Crop Here to complete a lock requirement in Veteran, you will still need to ship/donate 20 in Seedling, too.

You can't harvest honey until the second year, too, which locks you out of a lot of recipes.

You can buy honey at the grocery store in Westown though, iirc, as soon as you unlock it via your cooking level, I think. Which I did super early thanks to the Hot Milk trick. Now I need to look that up and it's going to bug me until I can do it, lol. Edit: yep, checked...I'm still in Year 1 and honey is for sale at the Westown grocery and has been for a fair while, for me. Pretty sure it was the amount of times cooked unlocking that 'topping' that got it added to the store. But it's possible that honey was for sale all along, too, I guess, not something I unlocked.

[Rancherita]

The Westown grocer recently started stocking honey in my playthrough, I'm in Summer Year 1. Not sure what did it: getting Westown at rank D or C, or getting my cooking skill up to 2 (just got it to 3 and I think honey was already there when I was buying milk and flour, but not at the very beginning).
EDIT: Maybe it got there when I upgraded the house and got the kitchen, not sure.

Thanks again for that hot milk trick, Kikki, been cooking up a storm to level my cooking, love that we can make dishes by batches and it all counts http://fogu.com/sos2/activities/cooking.html

[Kikki]

You're totally welcome, Rancherita. I'm just an in-a-hurry-to-get-things-done kind of a person and did not want to wait until year 100 to get 10,000 dishes cooked to max out my skill, lol. It's not a good money maker, unfortunately. (Or fortunately, since for some people a crazy money maker like golden flax in SoS wrecked the game for them.) I have my drinks branded up once, and I still only get about 7,000 G profit on a stack of 99 hot milks. Which is fine, since I only wanted it for the skill rank anyway.

Yeah, I remember honey coming into stock really early in the game. So you don't need to wait until year 2 to make stuff that calls for it if you don't want to, at least

I think all bokumono games try to set a pace for the players, though. SoS (1) did that in a too grindy, numerical way, for my tastes. This feels a little more natural with the town ranks and the farm tips. (I'm on the last requirement for my final farm tip list in Winter Year 1... the 'get all towns to B' requirement. I have one town to B and two towns at the 'lock' just before getting to B, so because of needing peaches I'll have to wait until Summer to finish it off, but I'm finding I don't mind. It was a bit tedious to pass time in SoS but I'm enjoying the seasons this time. So far, anyway. I can get through a season without it feeling like it takes forever.

I'm going to be able to complete the game without ever raising many crops very high, though...so there'll be crop-perfecting to work on after I finish the set goals. And getting more outfits and the final house style...I'm not working at all on stuff like that yet...I still need my Maiden with Shield (just need a Philosopher's Stone!) and some makers before I'll bother buying more outfits and decorative storage chests and so on. So so far to me the game pacing is pretty good. Not sure what year Trio is going to take me to, yet. Depends on if marriage and kid are interesting, probably.