I'd like to see claims be available for all players. The reasoning behind keeping it at lightfoot was because "most survival servers expire claims and we want to make players feel rewarded for voting." A replacement incentive for lightfoot could be 1000 claimblocks as opposed to the 100 you get currently with the rank.

Why do i think players would enjoy this idea?
I think keeping claiming behind lightfoot turns away a quantifiable percentage of new players, and by making it free to use (albiet with playtime capping how much they can claim right away) would be more attractive to newer players, after all prevention is better than a cure.
Making it so that everyone is able to claim further promotes wilder's friendly atmosphere because it prevents players who are intentionally trolling/greifing from harassing newer players. 

i think i would rate this idea about a 2 or 3 in terms of difficulty to change

The one issue that I could potentially see with this system is what happens to claims for new players that play on the server maybe for a day or two, then never come back? If the claims never expire, then that would mean that claim would forever be locked down and players that play extensively on the server could never utilize the space. With the current system, players have to play on the server and vote a number of times in order to recieve claim privilages. In other words, it makes players invest a bit (mostly in playing time) before they can make claims.

As far as griefing goes, I believe mods have the ability to roll back any griefing that is done by other players (please correct me if I'm wrong). They also strongly enforce anti-griefing rules to help detur griefing in the first place. I'm not sure if griefing is too much of an issue currently.

I understand the desire to make it easier for new players to claim. There's plenty of them who get griefed, and even with a rollback, it's annoying to deal with for anyone. 

A potential median point I could see is allowing them to have claims, but extremely limited, and to not allow any "play-time" claim blocks to accrue until a certain vote rank. That way, new players can claim still, but it will be just enough to claim an area to protect their main things. IE you get 100 claim blocks immediately, and once you're a lightfoot, you gain your play-time claim blocks retroactively. 

"The one issue that I could potentially see with this system is what happens to claims for new players that play on the server maybe for a day or two, then never come back? If the claims never expire, then that would mean that claim would forever be locked down and players that play extensively on the server could never utilize the space."
I dont think this is an issue because players who only play for a day or so would still have a stake on that land that they inhabit, and if they come back in a month or two their base will be the same as opposed to if they log in and their base is destroyed. As for space, it's still their space, even if theyre not very active.

As for ability to roll back player's buildings and items, mods can, but this isnt about "cans" and "can'ts" It's about preventing the issue in the first place. 

I am very interested in this idea, I am just not sure how to implement it differently...

1. We did this already as Seasons 1-3 were just like this — we allowed claim permissions for FERAL ranks and once you did wild warp it was a total ugly mess of a wasteland out there! Players thought our world was MUCH older and totally raided because of all these abandoned claims from players who played for only a few hours, or days, and never came back. Is there a way to solve those problems?

2. Votes are the only way new players find WilderCraft! Encouraging players to vote really helps the server, and I worry if we allow players to earn ranks via only time played they will AFK their way to ranks and claims without ever voting. And we'd lose a lot of new players discovering our server.

The main problem I see is teaching new players:
- you can't grief, even abandoned bases
- you can't steal, even abandoned chests

We also have a big problem with ban appeals around these two things, so I'm wondering if we can have some simple solutions like new players (based on playtime, not rank) who either break someone else's unprotected blocks, or open an unprotected chest, will receive a GUI book message reminding them about rules around grief, abandoned claims, stealing, etc. This way players can't argue "I didn't know" when we pull them aside to discuss rule infractions.

Perhaps some sort of claim decay, based on playtime/rank? With some kind of exponential curve, so that random survival huts by Ferals are classified as abandoned after a week or so of absence, but a dedicated base of an established player will keep its claim for a potentially arbitrarily long time (not really something to worry about if the player's claim won't expire before the season does).

Between small claim sizes and a claim decay timer, you can protect the claims of new players without cluttering the wilderness too much, since claims that small would be fairly trivial to reestablish if they did return three months later or whatever. If you felt like being particularly merciful, you could construct some sort of Lost-and-Found center around the spawn or something where all stored items found on an abandoned claim would be stashed, so they can be retrieved if the Feral ever does return (this would also prevent an 'except-if' clause to the no stealing rule, to keep people from seeking loopholes).