I still believe that gutting the novice network and removing it is the only way. People become awful human beings when they're in groups together, enabling each other.

Instead what I'd like is a request a mentor feature. If you have mentor status on and you're not currently in a duty then sprouts can request help/advice from you through a chat function. They're making some sort of strategy board for in game uses in the future right? Well they could probably implement something like that for use during mentor-sprout chat to help explanations too.