The game is balanced. It isn't focused on casuals or hardcore players, just hobbiests. Some aspects are difficult and some are not, the problem with difficult tasks is that it should be limited to loot rewards and not story elements. Story elements are there for world building, and if you lock that behind difficult activites you're block that portion of your playerbase from enjoying the game in it's entirety. This is where New Light went wrong. This also goes for forced PvP quest steps for progression, this goes for Raids not having a Story mode, this goes for activites being too easy and repetitive where they hold next to no value. Power is supposed to represent value, but the more serious players breeze through that anyway, and say "What's next? This is boring." We can't have Pinnacles anymore because it created a problem, with regular loot values and the overall experience of gameplay. We can't have Competitive Crucible anymore because of how P2P networking works, and on top of that had such grossly over used weapons that they became staples in PvE, which then created the gatekeeper problem because PvE players going against PvP players for the same rewards, but with a more difficult journey because they had to face already good players with the better weapons that they were trying to get to begin with. Iron Banner, a free weekly seasonal event for everyone, replaces Competitive Crucible with it's competitive status with being locked out of rewards until you meet a certain standard. Then the rewards were kept the same, and we just lost our accessibility to make the loot seem "prestigious". This is the problem with "difficulty" in this game. People say they want difficult, but it ends up being annoying and tedious. We need to have both, and not have it be interlaced into each other. We need to be able to choose the level of difficulty, and the quality of our rewards. We need to have options, and this game lacks that.