Extract list of variables with start attribute from Modelica model
The files dsin.txt and dsfinal.txt might help you around with this. They have the same structure, with values at the start and at the end of the simulation; by renaming dsfinal.txt to dsin.txt you can start your simulation from the (e.g. steady-state) values you computed in a previous run.  

It might be worthy working with these two files if you have in mind already to use such values for running other simulations.
They give you information about solvers/simulation settings, that you won't find in the .mat result files (if they're of any interest for your case)

However, if it is only a comparison between start and final values of variables that are present in the result files anyway, a better choice might be to use python and a library to read the result.mat file (dymat, modelicares, etc). It is then a matter of comparing start-end values of the signals of interest.
Is there an easy way to extract a list of all variables with start attribute from a Modelica model? The ultimate goal is to run a simulation until it reaches steady-state, then run a python script that compares the values of start attribute against the steady-state value, so that I can identify start values that were chosen badly.  
In the Dymola Python interface I could not find such a functionality. Another approach could be to generate the modelDescription.xml and parse it, I assume the information is available somewhere in there, but for that approach I also feel I need help to get started.