Chaotic is midcore, in case you were wondering

[Basteala]

My biggest problem with chaotic being "midcore" is the number of people you need--from what I've heard, running fewer people is suboptimal. In other words, more difficult. Which isn't exactly ideal for a midcore audience. The whole point of midcore is wanting a challenge where the game isn't holding their hand, but you aren't required to coordinate and schedule and make a second job out of content like hardcore progression--or just NOT progress 9 times out of 10 if you don't (sometimes PF can win one).

30 minutes does not make something hard. Alliance Raids themselves can sometimes take that long, yet they are not regarded as hard.

The main thing even standing in the way of it being regarded as that is the tile phase due mostly to just a few mechanics which cause the majority of players not to be able to progress.
Normal alliance raids require 24 players. Delubrum Reginae, which was pretty good, also involved 24 players originally. Same with CLL. None of these were "impossibly difficult" for a casual player that doesn't normally play the game.
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Sure, but Alliance Raids are braindead and there's a marked difference between picking 23 guys off the street vs having 23 people that are actually capable of progressing.

CLL on the other hand I'll give you. CLL would happily punch you in the mouth if you weren't paying attention and was satisfying to do, but nowadays it's hard to get those groups together because of a lack of extrinsic motivation, and I would argue Chaotic is the same way.

It's almost like tying the relic quests to tome grinding was a terrible, terrible idea.

[Xrono_Amber]

Let me ask you this, do you consider Strayborough first boss to be that? Because you just exactly asked for Strayborough difficulty. But good luck trying to convince most players "look guys, strayborough is a midcore content". And ive seen wipes to that boss where they have to reset.

My hot-take is that when people ask for more "midcore" content, they essentially want dungeon-bosses from Dawntrail, but made separately from said dungeons so it would "feel" cooler.
And they want this said feeling because of this:

Sure, but Alliance Raids are braindead...

Because of the reputation of casual content as "braindead". Is it easy? Yes, of course, that's the whole point of it.
But because of such evaluation it doesn't feel cool to say "I've cleared it!" And "midcore" is the desire to have something to brag about without the ability to invest much time in one instance or having some great gaming skills.