So not claiming that your ideas doesn’t have merits but a few answers to some of what you said:
Keeping a steady suply of avialable resources and keep the worlds somewhat pristine. Sure it comes with negatives but I really haven’t seen a better solution to the problems having a sandbox mmo with playerdriven ecomony pressents.
I am pretty sure that is the exact point of the materials being reolcated, if you have reasonable easy access to all resources the game stagnates, why would you need to explore or do something new if all your needs can be covered by a couple of beaconed areas?
The idea makes sense to some degree if having infinite resources available is what you strive for, but why exactly a non regen zone between the fixed regen and random regen zone?
Also those number are way way too large if anything it should be adjacent beacon zones or something like that a small guild could cover a world with those numbers O_o
This idea on the other hand seems way more balanced, and easier to work with.
Because trees are already available an-mass already? moving it 40 blocks to the left would do 0 for making it less available.
The idea itself is intersting but constant same-spot regen would make resources too common I think, if some kind of regen should be done what about going about it this way: (Assuming thats possible to code)
Resource clusters when they spawn for the first time gets tagged with a set amount of same place regens based on their rarity, (higher rarity means slightly more regens but a higher regen time) every time the cluster regenerates itself it removes 1 point from the number of regens available.
This would make camping out a spot viable but at some point still remove the resource it still come with the problem of the regen counter resetting every time someone move into the area though.