Official feels more accomplishing?

This is just my opinion and experience as a newish player:

I started in official, but the learning curve was so frustrating; kept dying from starvation, sickness, and zeds. I switched to a community server where it made things easier (vanilla +), and was able to learn the basics easier. My girlfriend and I got bored after we learned the basics; but also because the server we were on was kind of dead.

We wanted to experience something more authentic, as we felt every community server, even vanilla, had some sort of mods, that took away from the raw hardcore survival challenge we wanted.

We now play on a decent sized server, where an encounter with a real person is rare, but extremely stressful. Loot is scarce, and dying when cleaning our inventory leaves us shell shocked for 2-3 days. We survived for a record of 7 hours now, and it feels like such an accomplishment, since we could barely survive for more than an hour the first month or so.