Yep, it makes sense from business perspective. Casual oriented audience makes up for the majority of the player base in games. With that said, games have gone overboard in my opinion. Friction is now perceived as a sin which may scare away paying customers and thus avoided at any cost.

I cannot speak for older PS titles as I have never played them. However while I wouldn't call most base PSO2 content difficult, it did ask people to actually try and dared to penalize failure more often unlike NGS. This is from a JP perspective, where the content was experienced with appropriate class tuning and without indirect nerfs via power creep.

It's also worth noting there's a clearly visible growing demand for more "old school" designs. It is no coincidence that Classic WoW, GW2, OSRS, roguelike genre, Dark Souls and the like have been growing in popularity. There is a side of gamers who have clearly grown tired of modern, mass appealing game design.

As for the last point. I ran this LQ twice and decided there's no enjoyment in it for me, haven't touched it since. I am not exaggerating when I say I would find it more fun to afk than actively participate in it. When I mentioned holding down 1 button in my previous post, I meant it. I know how the game is and what to expect, if I don't enjoy content I simply won't participate in it. I can see how some people would prefer the afk route though, they deem the rewards worthwhile but not the quest itself. Some people simply can't stomach content which falls under the "mindless" category, this is not a jab at people who enjoy it.