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We have had suggestions along the way that the starting characters should have higher level, better ships, etc., so this conflicts with your desire to start lower and slower.

You can try the following: 

Select a lower tiered character.  The bios of each character contain a "Starting Conditions" where a brief summary of their starting loot/ships/level are highlighted, to give you an idea of what they will start with.  If you like the character Pardal and his items/ships, but don't like starting at Level 5 from the start, you can check the Disable Autolevel box at the start and Pardal will still start with the loot specified, but at Level 1 instead.

A high difficulty level will increase the stats of your enemy health, speed, damage dealt, and also the strength of enemy ships, and to some extent the loot on corpses, but not the frequency of shop/trader items.  You can slow down your rate of experience with another slider option -- left for low, right for higher.

There are several hundred items in the game, and they do have some settings to limit their availability based on your rank, and random frequency to make some more rarely show up, but some are very common.  I believe many of the basic books are common at level 1 because typically a starting char can't afford them in a shop, but then they easily show up as corpse loot because to date, there is no separation between frequency in store vs. loot.  Probably a worthwhile consideration to do so.

There are some other settings that might help tailor the experience more to your liking under the Menu, Options, lower right Mod Options...things like Realistic Ship Purchase, Realistic Damage, Less Powerful Skill Books (reduces bonus stacking), etc. If you modify those options at the main Menu, then OK, it should keep those as the defaults for your subsequent new games.  If you have already started a game, you must load a save from that game, then change the options as they are now specific to that save file; then save again.  However keep in mind that if under that same profile, if you load an older save, from before you changed those options, they are actually stored in the save game state, and they will still be the older settings you had;  After you save, all future saves will contain your new settings, but older saves will not.

I appreciate your feedback and we try to accommodate as much as we can, but we've noticed that player requests often directly contradict...some want it easier, some want it harder.  We'll do what we can, but we also don't really want 2,831,557 different configurable settings either, LOL.