the harsher the truth they will face once they are no longer under protection
I think the whole idea is to make that truth a little more...reasonable. It's not like new players don't know that, at current time, it's possible to lose all their troops and half their resources because someone 9.9x bigger just had to have 2k more resources right now. It's just too much and is probably a huge part of the reason new players don't stick around.
It's not always 100 pt beginners deciding they don't have the patience. When I was starting out, one of my nearest neighbors had gone inactive and actually taken the trouble to change their name to "Inactive" and their city name to "Attacked too often to progress."
Going off of that, another possible change is to make that "same player can't attack too soon after attack" expand to everyone. That way people can't be the recipient of 3 DIFFERENT ATTACKS IN THE SAME HOUR BY PLAYERS OVER 5X THEIR SCORE (yes this happened to me and if I hadn't recently learned that walking was a thing that would probably have been the moment I left the game).
The low protections don't exactly encourage bullying, but they make it a little too easy. What possible reason would someone have to attack someone 10% of their score when they could attack someone with 70%, still lose no troops, and get a lot more res? I can only imagine it's just to keep the little guy from climbing at all, just because they can ( = bullying). Try explaining the logic to people who do this. The playerbase shrinks, and everyone loses, even the bullies, they get a smaller victim pool. As for everyone else: people who are big on the team playing lose potential tribemates/allies, people who are in it for a HEALTHY competition lose some of the field, and people who just mind their own business have a higher proportion of bullies to deal with.