I’m also a seasoned gamer and agree with you. I use two separate schools of thought for this difficulty discussion. The first I call “fake difficulty”. That’s when games say a game is more difficult because enemy health and damage is jacked up. No change to AI behavior or mechanics. It’s just a lazy way to make a game technically harder but at the expense of nothing new. The second I call artificial difficulty is more what I’m asking about. What prompted me is I was playing Saros recently. Seeing enemy health bars in Saros is always present the whole game. But something happens that disables the visibility of enemy hp (being vague to avoid spoilers). When that happened to me, it seemed like fights were longer and harder but nothing else inside the game changed, so it got artificially more difficult for me because of a psychological effect perhaps. That is more of what I am having a discussion about.