I'd say that there has in the past been a problem with people "raping" eq,
and--to a limited degree--I think there are still some monsters that are
killed entirely too often for the sake of tune. I will say that the
difficulty of eq monsters has significantly slowed such activities. On the
same note, the degree if difficulty has made many monsters generally worthless
to kill, which generally interrupts the cycle that you described.
As for making newbie eq monsters earlier, I don't think that will help
situations much at all because most players are too lazy to find out from
where there eq comes. Furthermore, it will just encourage reavers to do these
monsters more than they already do.