You do NOT want Distant Lands as late as possible. In fact, you want a continuous stream of Distand Lands over the game. If you think DL sucks because you try to make it work only shortly before the game ends, it's no wonder the comparison with Sojourner makes no sense to you. Also, it's not like Sojourner does anything before you play it, either. In fact, only very few cards do.
Distant Lands is a bad card like Province is a bad card: It makes you win the game, sure, but it doesn't help you build your deck to buy expensive Provinces, Duchies, and
Distant Lands.
I "get"
Distant Lands and I'd go on about strategy of
Distant Lands, but that is irrelevant. When people say "Sojourner compares to well to Estate" the response of "Well,
Distant Lands compares too well to Duchy" is malarkey.
Sojourner is a vanishing Silver, a one-shot Laboratory, or possibly the only source of trashing or +Buys.
Since Silver is often a not-so-great card, that one-shot leg-up to your economy can often be reasonably valuable.
Expedition and Lastfootnote's Gambler have both shown how surprisingly quickly one-shot Laboratories become better than Silver. We both know that thinning is winning. On top of that, Sojourner gives a Victory point. The only part of Sojourner that can reasonably be called niche is its +Buys effect, and a bet a lot of the time that this effect could be useful it won't be used because everything else Sojourner offers is so good they'll all be gone before you could ever use the +Buys.
Often at $2, your options are simple things like: Estate,
Duchess, or nothing. Sojourner, much like Hamlet or Pearl Diver, is a card you will simply buy because it's effectively never bad. Especially in 2-player, where 1VP more commonly decides the game, the split of Sojourner is going to be important (notably, it will also never split evenly outside of 2-player games, which I think is argument enough for it to be a Victory card that is set aside).
With
Distant Lands, you have to contend with buying
Distant Lands or a $5 card that actually helps your deck get to buying Provinces. That makes it an interesting choice, since you can hamstring yourself by buying them too early. Sojourner is competing with nothing, easy to pick up with +Buys, and free to play once it is in your deck: When is it
ever a bad idea to buy Sojourner? Probably only when you have no cards to trash and you'll draw Sojourner in Summer.
In its current form, I would often buy it even without the Victory point. With the Victory point, I think it has to cost $3 or $4.
If it doesn't have the Victory point, the card is much less exciting (outside of when it's the only good trashing available because that's pretty interesting) which might be why you decided to include the Victory point--but why bother? It would lose its contentious use of VP tokens and it remains a good card that you'd often take with a $2 buy anyway.
Student uses all the tokens, sure. I don't see why that's a problem, though. It's not like you couldn't use the other cards anymore. You will have to decide, but i can imagine a few decks where you use Training to shift your +action directly to your terminal draw after a while. Also, if you try to piledrive them before they turn actually useful, you are going to have a bad time.
I misread the card as being mandatory to move your tokens, so monopolizing the tokens is not a problem. Sorry for that. (By the way,
Lost Arts is the +1 Action token, not
Training which is for the +$1 token)
Certainly you don't want all the Students as soon a possible: Your economy will be sore until Winter unless there are amazing terminals at sub $4. However, in any Kingdom that is going to last long enough for a second Spring, you will have the time to piledrive them in late Fall\early Winter if you got on in Spring to begin with. It is interesting enough and probably not too strong, but I'm already not a fan for its use of Adventures's tokens.
I'm also curious if it will ever become a case that choosing not to contest Student will cost a player the game, because getting cantrips\
Market Squares to stop another player from getting
Bazaar+Buys sounds like quite a losing proposition if you don't get a Student super early.