You're not looking far enough. There are three separate areas of Newton Caverns. The caverns, Lolliprin (and the mountain) and then on top of the mountain. You have to do things to get to each harder location though, teaches you to quest.

Although to be fair, I found getting to Lolliprin to be incredibly frustrating; endless hacking away hoping for widgets or chains to drop generally ended in me simply waiting for a peak time and letting someone ELSE trigger the damnable portals. Got to the point where the only reason I left was cos me character was about to pass out from hunger. And woe be to you if you decide to go off killing gnomes in the caverns! I found it a nightmare to navigate their half of the caverns; finks' territory seemed way, way easier for some reason, I'm not sure why.

Getting around is easy enough, and I found the portal thing just not bothered to get through it. I'm used to newbie quests being 100% worthless.

You definitely want to get to the top of Smoke Mountain. It's infinitely better than the caverns.

If you head straight to the top of the mountain, it's not unreasonable to have most of your basic curing items with an extra 10-15k left over pocket change by the time you graduate novicehood.

It's definitely worth the effort.

I made 10k an hour there on an alt...left newbiehood with 20k+ gold...