If you'll mod out meteors on forest, jungle, snow, desert, arid, and grassland planets (or just take them out of the game entirely), I'll totally join your server! Right now I'm playing single-player until someone does that because I just can't bear the thought of having my base suddenly demolished.
For what it's worth, not every planet seems to have these phenomena, though I could be mistaken about that. We currently have a nice castle in the works, and it's yet to be toppled by anything.
They don't some planets have special weather types (meteors, rainbow rain, acid rain--FUCKING ACID RAIN, I HATE IT, IT BURNS), others don't.
The problem with meteors is there is no indication whatsoever whether a planet will have them, and it can take hours before they appear. I spent FOUR HOURS on a planet, exploring and starting to build, before the first meteor came out of nowhere and destroyed everything.
And no, you can't protect yourself by building an obsidian roof, because the meteors spawn at the edge of your screen, even if you're indoors. So if the obsidian roof isn't visible at the moment, you can still get smashed to pieces without warning. It can even happen underground. The meteors just chase you around the planet.
Really, it's a completely broken feature right now. I've modded it out of any planet biomes I might want to build on (the ones I listed before). I left them on the other biomes because I have no problem with a risk of meteors while I'm just exploring or mining.
And yeah, they need to find a better way to deal with things than just centering everything around the player. It should be a simple matter to put a timer on the crops so they catch up when you re-enter the area, as has been said already. I'll have to go and get that mod - I didn't realize it had been fixed and was just growing everything on my ship (a very limited space). Meteors could be handled by first checking the player's surroundings and seeing if they're underground or indoors before they fall (something the game already knows how to do). I don't know about the rest of the planet. It's kind of absurd that meteors only fall where you are, that NPC constructions are never damaged by them unless you happen to be nearby, but on the other hand I know the whole planet can't be loaded at once or the game would kill your computer.
If I install this mod to fix the crop growing times, will it interfere with playing on a multiplayer server?
As far as the meteors go, that's handled server-side, I believe, so unless someone is willing to at least partially mod them out of a server, I'm still sticking with single player, at least until they update the game so we can tell which planets will have meteors before we spend hours building on them.