Messages

I'm 99.99% sure that's part of Allow Tool, since I noticed it being gone when, during the unstable builds, I played vanilla for the first time in about 600 hours of playtime.
Can't give any help with the 'it disappeared' part, though.

I think a good solution for debuffing the event would be to 1. Have the stranger leave when the colony is back on its feet and 2. Not allow the stranger in black to drop his gear (By direct command or outfit policy, or imprisoning and stripping him, but that wouldn't be easily explainable).

The Hopper, you mean?

It probably wouldn't make much sense for most things. Textiles (Such as cloth and leather), wood, stone chunks, steel, and components wouldn't work well in a hopper. At most it might make a bit of sense for breweries, drug labs (When making yayo, flake, and smokeleaf joints), and stoves (When cooking with plants), as they're the only production benches that use a commodity that'll flow through a hopper. But overall, a hopper wouldn't help much if you're doing things by hand.

Side tip: You can place ingredients in a one tile stockpile adjacent to the crafting bench to effectively increase work speed by reducing the time it takes for the colonist to get the ingredients.

It seems like the gift feature is a lot like what Hospitality did, only you don't have to build a bedroom or do anything for the visitors and it applies to caravans, and it doesn't seem to be likely that they'll just give me back the 21% condition awful cloth tuque I just sold them for less than a silver to get rid of it.

Biomes further from the equator tend to have a larger temperature range. Looking at the map, tiles in the boreal forest and tundra area of the map tend to have a temperature range of around 40. Going up to the ice sheet gets you 50, going down to the equator gets you 10 or even 5.

I think the general intent of this is allowing the player to choose how challenging temperature, as well as the overall environment, is. Choosing a temperate forest or arid shrubland close to the equator will probably make temperature less of a concern, while choosing a tundra will make it more of a concern.

As a side note, and maybe a solution to your problem: when generating the world, you can increase its overall temperature. This won't change the increase in temperature difference as you go away from the equator, but it will make tiles with a large temperature range warmer (or colder). If you move the overall temperature slider up one 'tick', you can find temperate forest biomes with a temperature range of 40 or 50, with around -10 in the winter and 30 in the summer.
This won't really give you extreme cold AND extreme hot on the same tile, though, but enough to be out of a colonist's comfortable range on both ends.