Hey vmeezo, thanks for giving 9 Dayz a try. As you noticed yourself, the game is pretty rough. I would add: brutal and unforgiving - by intention ;-)
Watching your stream clearly shows the need of a better battle tutorial. Its still on my todo list.
Some hints: You can try to Lure single zombies into a fight, when successful, fighting them one by one makes things much easier. Attacking will make all other zeds around join into the fight. Ignoring the first 2 in the beginning almost always is the better choice. Crafting an axe or club makes sense: they have durability and can be used 3x. You need an axe to break building doors, stones won't be enough for that. Managing your items is a big thing, as you also figured out. Game will let you constantly walk on the edge - its intended to be like that. However, an easy mode for slowly getting into it might also be a thing I should consider - otherwise it will leave many players frustrated (which is pretty typical for such types of harsh survival games, though).
As you can see in my answer in the other comment below, surviving as totally possible - but I need to find a way to teach all these things in tutorial mode. It is just so much information, not sure how to package all of it without writing walls of text.