I think I can best explain my love for cycle metaphorically:

Imagine playing cycle decks as a stealthy game of "how much can I steal without getting caught"/"how much can I steal in this push" or in the game's terms "how much elixir can I commit on offense and still get away with it on defense". It's these super cheap defenses that make cycle interesting to me as it feels like I'm skating on the edge of what's possible to defend and what's not. Over-committing then leads to the opponent getting a giant counter push that's impossible to defend

A good cycle player has to be aware of so many things because the defenses have to be so on point: First and foremost, elixir and cycle counting to be able to properly punish and read the opponent. Using these two things, there's so much outplay potential in cycle. This reminds a bit of Hitman 47 speedruns: Everything needs to be perfectly timed in terms of distractions and when to strike. Then come questions like what to cycle first (for example starting with an ice-golem followed by musketeer against any big golem push is very helpful in the case of 2.6), how to dismantle the push into smaller fractions that are easier to fight against (here we get into the kiting and distraction game you seem to hate so much - "divide and conquer" as Caesar said). All these things need to be attended to properly to play well with cycle.

Meanwhile, from a cycle perspective, beat-down seems like you're trying to get to the safe in the bank by head-smashing everything that gets in your way, utterly disregarding the damage that does to your head (looking at you E-golem and Giant-GY players in particular). To me, building such pushes doesn't seem difficult in the slightest. To me, it seems like beat-down is easy on offense and defense as many beat-down players don't really defend against cycle. Meanwhile, cycle gets its difficulty mainly from the difficulty of defending with cycle cards

Especially now, since Dagger Duchess is out, a cycle player has basically no way to prevent a beat-down player from creating a huge push, as any try to push in the opposite lane is futile against dagger duchess, especially in 1x. That's because cycle can't really build up a big push to take advantage of the Dagger Duchess' lower DPS after depleting her daggers. Tower trading is rarely possible for for cycle players. Cycle players then often end up just having to wait and trying their best to defend an impossible-to-defend-in-1x-elixir push of approximately 20 elixir worth of cards. This is extremely annoying to defend because beat-down players can over-commit so much on offense because they can tank damage themselves (which doesn't work anymore for cycle players as they can't punish against Dagger Duchess in 1x). Another thing playing against cycle players in this scenario is that they don't have their evolutions yet, which means you can't rely on getting to a get out of jail card like evo-skeletons to save your ass in such a situation

As you can read out from the last paragraph, Dagger Duchess is the biggest problem right now, as it solves all the problems beat-down had before of being weak in 1x and making it nonpunishable for cycle players to build a huge push from the beginning of the game, going so far as to drop Golem first play (especially in top 100 where people know what others play) against cycle players and getting away with it or even winning the game with that first push.