The one thing that annoys me the most about the current system is the high-level quests for new adventurers. Honestly, I once got a bronze colossus as my first quest.
I don't see that as a problem. At the moment (at least[1]) if you can't do the quest you can just ignore it and do ones you can. In my experience (a couple of versions old, so it
may have changed in the meantime) you quite easily get loads and loads of quests just by spamming the appropriate quest-queries on every friendly individual you get jaw-jaw time with. Then pick'n'choose by distance (possibly also direction, if you've got a journey plan in mind), the nature of the enemy (e.g. avoid the colossi, take your chances only against bandits at first, later on go for the stuff where there's a single quick take-down of monsters unlikely to have following mobs, etc, etc) and off you go, to die at the hands of the first bit of wildlife you disturbed, before even getting to the quest. However, if you survive all that, rather than having to rediscover all the stuff you discarded earlier when you've become tough-enough, you have them all handily in a list already.
Hence why I think a quest display filter is the answer.
As to Met's issue with bandits-only... Perhaps the particular worldgens that you regularly use have a large megabeast die-off and bandits (to my knowledge, BICBW, just sparked into existence procedurally as long as there's a civilisation around for them to have come from) thus become the dominant force.
[1] In the future, it's quite possible that there are other roving adventurers in the world (AI ones, of course, give Toady's natural disinclination towards completely overturning the existing game style(s) in order to allow a multiplayer experience) who are also attempting to mop up various quests. Perhaps so that when you end up making decisions that make you various new (or changing) friends and enemies with different civilisations, you and they end up on a collision-course with perhaps even quests against each other arising (at the same time!?!?!)...