Quote Originally Posted by Cheezeman3000 View Post
Appreciate the insight and all the research you've been putting into this. I was only assuming it's an oversight due to it being bad game design, so I was giving them the benefit of the doubt. If the intention really was to make the fish 5x harder to catch after finishing a quest, it goes against the design philosophy they've applied to the rest of the game.
If you're going to make that claim, try making a new character and fishing for this without completing the quests. You might just find that the difficulty does not change nearly as much as you're believing.