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I think having less surface steel is okay but perhaps should be better telegraphed to the players by including that into description of the mod.
I think there are enough ways to get steel in the game. For example, you have a lot of farmable land but no steel? Start a massive drug production and in a year, you will be able to order bulk traders nonstop and buy any amount of steel you need. Same can be done if you have some wood/stone and a person who is good at art. There is still deep drilling and steel chunk/raider gear smelting (I also heard that organs sell well these days). If you are running mods than chances are you also have additional sources of steel (Resource plants from Vegetable garden or Core mining or others).
That being said, I think temperate tiles should be averagely balanced since those are the tiles that new players are most likely to play.

Are you planning to write custom resource generator then?

It never really crossed my mind since I dunno what I'd use it for.

If you want something like a silver or gold clump in or part of the wall of your cave it'd probably have to be coded in your genstep.  I think the assemblies are kinda lenient with overwriting already placed mineable stuff so if you just copy the scatterAt(IntVec3 c, Map map) methodfrom the GenStep_ScatterLumpsMineable and throw it in your class.  Theoretically if you plugged an IntVec3 from your tunnel into that it should create a rare resource clump in part of your tunnel.

If you want items... oh boy I haven't delved into that part of the assemblies yet, but it probably should be even easier.

Ah, ok. I just thought that you wanted to write a custom scatterer to push resources deeper and outside from outer rock layers.
I was planning to do all that in my genstep anyway . And I have some ideas about how to do items. Haven't looked at corpses/skeletons though.

P.S. added some stuff to my previous post.

Create new variants of original stones that are for example 10x harder.

If only RimWorld assemblies were that nice.
If I want to make a new rock, it will be treated exactly like sandstone or granite or limestone...

Which has its own pro's and con's it'd mean a map could have like "sandstone and hard slate" or "hard limestone, hard granite and sandstone".  Which is interesting, but kinda doesn't do anything about the whole 'build cave bases like caves' thing.

It all pushes me towards keeping the 'hard stone' renaming it 'mountain' and just putting it all a lil further back into the stone formations.  That and if work with you on getting a decent sort of cave thing going... it could work out pretty well.

Btw, I'm hopefully getting someone to help with art soon, so I should have more time to fool around with the code and help get something like caves working.  It'd be a nifty addition especially if I did something like push most of the precious metals further into the mountains.

Right.... I completely forgot about world tiles having specific stone types 
I Still think it is quite doable just need some more research and thinking... I have some ideas so will test it out tomorrow.
I will clean up my code for caves tomorrow and send you a pr on github. It works just need some real playtesting to see how it is in terms of balance and decide if we want any variability/other features. It is implemented as a new GenStep so is independent of other parts but needs terrain and roofs already generated to work.
Are you planning to write custom resource generator then?

--EDIT--
Ok found a solution. Here is screenshot example. White rocks are identical to sandstone(except for hp) and spwan in place of sandstone on higher perlin noise values. Will drop chunks, wont show up in in world generation.
Current method relies on HugsLib and uses specific defNames for those rocks.

I am not a fan of the new "hard stone" making most of the rock areas. Its existence considerably reduces the amount of stone on the map. At least they should give more resources than regular stone instead of less.
Also, there doesn't seem to be multiple colors of this new rock type, having only one dominant color instead of the natural variety is a loss in my opinion.

Perhaps instead add compressed granite, sandstone..etc that gives you the same chunks but has more hp? Put that instead of original stone on deeper mountain levels and you get harder deep mining and easy to mine surface layers.

hmmm very interesting.  That actually wouldn't be very hard to do either.
I like the idea of mountain bases taking on a cave'y feel, like you can't mine out the perfect cave home in a season or tow... but hmmm, maybe if the tough stone is more towards the center of mountains instead of also on the outside?

That's what I'm saying. Create new variants of original stones that are for example 10x harder. (You can call them deep or compressed or something like that) And then just instead of doing if(mountainability>num) do if(mountainability>num*1.5/*find good multiplier*/) {spawn hard versions of stones} else if (mountainability>num) {spawn original versions}.
If I'm not missing anything should give you mountains with hard centres and soft outer layers. And still allow to get all the chunks for brick production.

I am not a fan of the new "hard stone" making most of the rock areas. Its existence considerably reduces the amount of stone on the map. At least they should give more resources than regular stone instead of less.
Also, there doesn't seem to be multiple colors of this new rock type, having only one dominant color instead of the natural variety is a loss in my opinion.

Perhaps instead add compressed granite, sandstone..etc that gives you the same chunks but has more hp? Put that instead of original stone on deeper mountain levels and you get harder deep mining and easy to mine surface layers.

So, since blackhalo said he has no time to add infested caves to the mountain maps and I really liked that idea, I started to do it myself.
I have most basics working and here are some screenshots. (Screenshots are made using older version of BT)
I will make a PR once stuff is more finished and polished. Hopefully tomorrow it will be ready for testing.

Now I need some external opinions on some of the features:
1) Should these caves be on every mountains map or should it be a random map feature?
2) Should the number of caves be random?
3) Do you want to see additional resource nodes inside the caves? (This may be void question since I haven't looked at the new resource scattering system blackhalo added)
4) Do you want to see some high value items and human/animal corpses be scattered near the hives?

--EDIT--
Added couple more images at the end.

Have you thought about perhaps adding some resource rich caves to the mountain maps? I have not looked how map generation is done in the game but I think taking cells with overhead mountain, applying some perlin worms and then adding extra resource nodes could give some interesting results...But I may be wrong as I am no game developer myself.

If you manage to put some insect hives in those caves it will workeven better. (Dreams of roleplaying dwarves who delved too greedily and too deep.)