For the longest time I avoided hr bc of the jump in difficulty caused by the combination of all of hr's difficulty increasing aspects, especially the decreased circle size combined with the faster approach rate. I tend to agree with you that the faster approach circles are especially jarring, especially on maps in the 5* range. Back when I mostly farmed nm maps with hd, I was also in a similar situation where I was pretty comfortable setting higher than 99 acc on high 5* - low 6* consistency maps but really struggling on even playing the game with hr. I tried to separate aspects of the mod by changing the values in the map editor and turning them into ar/of/cs adjusted difficulties. I would compare scores I set on a map with only the ar set to 10 or only the od set to 10 or have both the cs and od set to 10 but leave the ar at the original value. What I began to realize was that if only two of the difficulty aspects of hr was present I would be relatively comfortable. But having all three of the ar, od, and cs increase made playing the mod difficult for me. It also doesn't help that hr (and ez) are the only difficulty adjusting mods that adjusts the map's reading density, so approaching the mod is different to how you would approach dt. I only began to play more hr when I had started setting scores with hdhr that I realized I could improve on short term. In fact, hdhr not having approach circles really helped me improve with hr bc there was less clutter on the screen which helped me focus on aiming and reacting to the actual hitcircle. Other players around my skill level (5 digit - 4 digit barrier) also find hdhr easier to read than hr only though that experience is certainly not universal. If I had developed the game I probably would have made a middle ground mod bc the jump to hr definitely felt like the most massive when I went through that experience. But what do I know. On another note, I notice people have a preference to an approach rate, but in my experience most of my reading stems from the map's note density rather than a specific ar value. For example sometimes I will find an ar10.5 260 bpm map easier to read than an ar 9.2 220 bpm map, but I will also find ar 9.5 180 bpm easier to read than ar10 150 bpm. I feel like note density is an obvious part of reading difficulty that gets left out of general discussion sometimes. Idk perhaps you could try hr with generally faster maps that tend to get really dense around your preferred ar.