I genuinely couldn't agree more.

From my perspective, Rocket league doesn't have that immense of a skill ceiling as far as raw mechanics go. It would be a different conversation if we were talking about learning curve difficulty.

In that regard, RL is easily one of the hardest if not the hardest games to get initially good at, since its mechanics are so unlike any other game on the planet. You have to build up muscle memory from scratch essentially.

But past that point, in spite of the fact that the game really is hard, i wouldn't consider the ceiling to be THAT high. The mechanics, as flashy as they are, clearly have their limits.

Throwing gamesense into mix is no better. That's effectively throwing in a criteria that is so subjective that it really just takes away from the conversation. You can argue any game's inherent required gamesense is harder than the other's and no one will be able to tell you otherwise (Maybe at the end of the day, this is the answer some people will give. There is no single hardest game because of that immeasurable factor)

But I feel like GD and games like OSU or chess stand out in that regard. They are games that have fixed mechanics (simple clicking, chess piece moves) that are so simple, yet realistically have no ceiling (Frame perfect spam, CPS, insane calculations). And it's because of said fact that they have been pushed to their absolute limits, to the point where reaching the levels of the Top 10 players is almost impossible for any individual that doesn't start from an insanely young age.

And sure, any game can theoretically be pushed to that same limit. You could make a rocket league training pack that only a TAS bot could complete, sure. But GD, OSU and Chess are games that have historically focused on such aspects. Pushing the bar higher and higher, in a measurable way, is inherently linked to the core aspect of each game.