We haven't seen anything like that, either in testing or in the forums. In fact, if anything, the hard setting usually gives too much food (because of a different bug). If you started a hard tribe from an easy game and then changed the setting to hard, your game started with zero food, due to the bug that I just mentioned. If you want to make sure you're on the hard setting, you do need to start over.

It's normal for the collectibles to produce no tech points at the beginning of the game, since they are usually all collectibles you haven't already found. Tech points are awarded only for duplicate collectibles.