I did indeed think about travel distance, but yeah it's way too easy to bot if anyone would ever care about that. I'd still be on board for something like that to be honest, and it would end up including raider trips to and from bases. As for the weekly thing catering to noobs, it's meant to do just that. If providence does run forever as it's intended to do, then someone joining 5 years from now will basically miss out entirely on that feature, and just like with the feasting leaderboard the reward might end up being pretty lackluster for trying to catch up to someone with 5 years of advantage. In terms of feasting , at least it's doable by overshooting a crazy amount and buying the purest food ever of the best kind ever. The reward had better be worth the effort though ,or else people will not really care about getting a billion feasting score for a cookie, nor will they want to travel in a year as much as the top 1 explorer in 5. Give the weekly ranking no reward if that needs to be a thing, but it helps keep newbies interested one way or another instead of just excluding them from a lot of types of content. Consider the fact that distance covered is not a curve, it's linear, so not as easy to catch up as it would be with humours or other such things. It's a simple matter of brute-forcing it and past a certain point that gets too tedious and unfeasible.
And in term of it being worthy of existing, it's just a question of how many side-activities we want to give people to ward off boredom. As it stands exploration events aren't worth the time on their own, and get repetitive after a certain point. (I've been unlucky enough to bump into a good 30-40 caravans, to the point where despite their worth I just go "ughhh another one" )