The game is balanced around the default refugee start. Sheltered may be not worth it right now because monster evolution, food spoiling and winter should compensate for the LMOE shelter instead of leaving a 3P cost, but that’s an issue with the negative points, not the game mechanics.
I’m pretty sure the devs admitted somewhere that most of the challenge starts are lacking balance right now since a lot of recent changes interfered with them pretty hard.
On a side note, I don’t think changing the starting season on config should affect Z evolution at all, because it would be as the cataclysm itself happened on a different one. That would have some interactions with winter and sheltered starts tho, so maybe those should always be as if the cataclysm happened on a spring,
