I had no experience with this type of game (bard's tale was really too long ago), and the first time playing KotOR was *not*easy.. Calo Nord was hard, the Mandalorian raiders were, Bandon, The One (still a difficult battle) and finally Malak. I had to do several retries before defeating Malak. KotOR is not to easy when you have no experience with this sort of game, not too hard either, it's perfectly balanced.
Some ideas are taking it a bit too far. Having to run back to the hawk, or 'timeouts' are bad, bad idea's. Waiting and running up and down the same track will not make the game more fun to play.
Limiting resources (medpacks) might be an idea though, it could be controlled by the difficulty settings, just as the diffculty of your opponents.. Or maybe just more opponents in a battle (6~8 wraids in a group would require a different strategy for instance) at higher difficulty settings.