No. It is not.
The game should never tell people how to play optimally. It should tell the game rules, and how stuff works/correlates. How to play well? That is for the player to figure out.
Despite your claims that you dont consider casuals to be “bad players” anymore, you are not making it seem that way.
A tutorial should not play the game for you. It should tell you how to play yourself. Significant difference.
Nah, people learn by struggling. If you can always decide to fine-tune the difficulty, the risk is too high that you wont learn.
Fine-tuned difficulty is a blight imo. As is the case with D3s 150+ difficulty tiers.
The very best is when games have exactly 1 difficulty setting. Dark Souls and the like (I know, they have NG+, but that is not a freely adjustable difficulty setting).
That is of course really hard to pull off in A-RPGs due to the gear/character progression scaling, albeit not impossible. But at least keep it at relatively few difficulty tiers, with large jumps in between, to make them meaningful.
And during lvling; just have 1 single difficulty tier.
Imo don’t give people the option. Too many will pick the easy option, leading to low/slow learning.
Deep water all the way (after the introduction in early levels of course). It should not be punishing, that is not the purpose, but the sooner you stop holding players hands, the sooner they get the chance to learn.