I suppose will chime in some other ideas I had while catching up on the thread

Trial 1 and Trial 2 from Endwalker were amazing on the release month. People wiped, chatted on how the mechanic could be solved, asked and gave advice, and generally that ended in a clear after a few attempts

Now, what I wanna make important about this is that both of those trials were very important bosses in the narrative, so making them as hard as they are (specially trial 2), in my opinion, makes the victory and first clear so much more fullfilling

(And if you really struggled with it, you could either follow *that* NPC in trust, or get help from other players, wich kinda makes sense in a MMO)

If you wanna go back to ShB, maybe they could have done a bit more with the dungeon wardens, like thrice-come ruin to make them feel more like a active threat. Going as back as to ARR, you have the leveling trials with very decent difficulty spikes to emphasise how the primals are strong enemies

To wrap the idea what im trying to say is, they could, and have used difficulty to make the MSQ presentation of a foe, feel more accurate. If something is presented as a big enemy, it should feel like a big enemy in the combat.

I personally think the Four lord series, Titania, EW trial 2 and even the Sky pirate series are great examples of difficulty used well in a narrative game, and even as someone that does Savage nowdays, I still find great enjoyment in any of these instances as they are a straight foward, but enjoyable challenge, packed into fun fights

I feel like Dixie is more sick of the "Square peg, into the square hole, circle peg... into the square hole" design that a lot of normal mode suffers from, than the difficulty itself being "easy"