I just sold the Hammerhead pretty much immediately and started chasing down bounties, solo, personally.
It was straightforward, once I got past the first major fight (four frigates and a wing vs. me at lvl 2 in the Wolf, solo, for a 10K bounty). That wasn't much fun, but I got it.
I agree that the starting Wolf variant is pretty newbie-unfriendly without Advanced Optics as its currently laid out, but that's largely because of Beams not doing any Hard Flux and the lame AI shield behaviors that make it ridiculously hard to get the kill vs. Pirate Lashers; I had to micro the Harpoons to get it done, and it wasn't terribly fun, largely because the behavior is so inhuman and just wastes so much time, not because it's hard per se, once you understand that that is the only method that will work.
I still think Beams not doing any Hard Flux and being largely the ultimate kiting weapons up until late game is not a feature, and this start sort of demonstrates why; until the Wolf gets the Advanced Optics range bonus, it can't really do push-kills at kiting ranges with the Tac Lasers vs. shielded opponents if it's out of Harpoons, and ultimately a Wolf pack is all about the missile spam.
However, once it can do stand-off kills that way and has enough numbers to keep shields pushed down, a Wolf pack is ungodly; it combines more missiles per vessel than practically anything else can do for the Logistics, save Lasher packs, with heavy firepower than cannot be answered by anything less than a Cruiser, range-wise, as it's doing 325 constant DPS at 800 range with no missing and very little that can knock shields down. I'm not sure that's the most ridiculous thing available (I'd wager that giant packs of Cerebus with ITU + Heavy Mauler are perhaps superior, and Lasher packs oriented for missile spam and kinetic kills are nasty) but it's close. If the AI handled Wolfs in that configuration halfway well, I'd wager they'd routinely defeat anything in the game, though, including fully-upgraded Onslaughts- it'd just take all day and you'd be at 0 CR at the end of the battle.
It's about the most inverted difficulty setup ever, really; vs. shielded opponents, the only way to win it is to push their Soft Flux up to Overload when pushed with a Harpoon, then kill with the beams. But it's not intuitive or easy to kill like that; the timing and even arcing the ship to make sure the Harpoons hit (due to their weird, sinusoidal guidance pattern atm) makes it pretty hard. The AI does a very bad job; either it kills most of an enemy fleet almost immediately, or all of the Harpoons are gone and now it's grind-kills. So I usually give my AI Wolfs Mining Blasters or Pulse Lasers, so they'll close and swarm stuff to death, instead.
Heavy Blasters and / or Pulse Lasers are far more newbie-friendly for a starter ship, in that their mechanics are really straightforward and don't take much expertise to play out, other than not allowing missiles around the shield while closing. But they're really inefficient at Level 0; only the Heavy Blaster offers enough oomph that a newbie might find it fun, if they can figure out how to not die when facing 2:1 odds or worse.
Giving the "easy" start another couple of Frigates with the same Burn levels would really change the dynamic, though; then players could catch 3-4 Frigate units and pretty much assured of a win. Once I reached that point, everything else has been a relative cakewalk. It would be genuinely easier than the solo-frigate starts.
