In my opinion they key to lengthen the early game on tsw relates to trade gold. A lot of the pros here know that if they can get specific items on farm such as umo's,hard charms earliest they can make back plus more on their investent early game. For example in 2.2, you could make a javazon for peanuts get phoboss on farm and sell umos to make a huge profit. If Median had a way of limiting the budget of everyone to say 200 tg, I believe it would be much more competitive, you would be forced into making different decisions early games, for example is it worth saving up tg to buy specific relic,umos or choice items.
If people wanted to gain an advantage by buying tg which supports the server, its fair game. But right now most of the tg is just simply recirculated tg imo. But after a certain period of time say 2-4 weeks, all your tg would be useable from previous seasons. The problem with this method though is you could see people making multiple accounts and transfering trade gold to newly created accounts and trade via these accounts.
Right now as it stands the Median economy never really resets on a ladder start unless you play hardcore.