I think the current system with the Echo works just fine. Instead of assuming new players are going to suck and need their hands held from the start you need to give them a chance to prove they actually require help first, which is exactly what the Echo does. I would personally be pretty pissed if I were about to do a trial for the first time and the game took me aside to tell me it was going to nerf the difficulty right from the start just because I'm new. If it's going to do that it might as well just cut out the gameplay all together and just show me a cutscene of me beating the boss.

It'd be like playing a new console game and wanting to start on Hard (or I guess Medium in games where Hard and above has to be unlocked), but the game is like "Nah, this is your first time playing so I'm going to make you play on Very Easy first", completely disregarding the possibility that I might have decades of gaming experience that would allow me to take the plunge. That would make me flip a table. What it should do is offer to lower the difficulty if it thinks I'm dying too much (which is exactly what the game does right now), but at no point should it force me to let it hold my hand.

Likely the only reason SE is even adjusting certain duties in 3.1 (which is what I'm assuming is what prompted this thread) is due to a wildly disproportionate amount of wipes or drops in comparison to all the rest, even with the inclusion of the Echo. I've never personally had any real trouble with 99% of this game's content, but I'll trust SE to er... trust... their own collected data on this one.