I personally wouldn't mind if we had to do something similar to the relic steps back at ARR launch. Then again, I'm in the minority when it comes to harder content, so basically anything else aside from Eureka. Hell, I'll take light farming every for every relic step until my eyes bleed, over doing anything in Eureka.

I think HW, aside from unidentified pre-nerf, was a good balance in terms of grind and difficulty (since we got to choose the content, which would make progression go faster/slower depending on what you did).