Here is the rub.
There are probably a dozen active posts here and in the dungeon forums about mythic+ being too hard.
How many posts are there asking for help? For understanding of how to tackle a particular boss, dungeon, or trash pack? Ways to improve? Ways their spec can best handle a situation?
Spoiler - it’s 0.
Idk, but these kinds of threads make me believe the only difficulty some people have in life is through playing a stupid videogame 
One of the few I guess that plays this game, and other games just to unwind, relax, after dealing with real life challenges, difficulty’s, etc. But yeah, I just stick to doing things in this game that doesn’t stress me out.
I have a bigger problem right now with the game being too easy actually.
This game is simultaneously made for actual babies and pro streamers. Average gamers get nothing.
My issue isn’t 100% with the difficulty. Something can be difficult and fun and other things can be difficult and frustrating. There’s nuance to it.
I gave your post a like because I agree with it, but I want to comment on this bit right here:
Because content changes. Keys are the best example. They are constantly being tweaked and overhauled seemingly every season. New affixes, new dungeons, and level squishes have happened. What was fun and doable previously may no longer be fun and doable. If you ran +7s last season, you will continue to do +7s this season and see they are not the same as they once were. This is why people take to the forums to ask what gives.
So to me personally difficulty IS fun!
HOWEVER
If difficulty means not just that the content itself is challenging but that failure will punish me and my group somehow it’s just frustrating. I don’t love that deaths in delves will remove the bountiful status for example, though that one is fairly forgiving. Key downgrades in mythic if you do not time everything right? No.
Mythic raiding I did used to enjoy but honestly it was getting geared/prepared for it to the point of treating WoW like a second job that made me burn out spectacularly and turn casual.
I do not love seeing people around me get frustrated due to failures, mine or anyone else’s. But in a good-natured pug group in a raid, I’ll be there until the bitter end pull after pull.
There’s guides for that though, and most people get their knowledge from those.
The real issue with this season’s M+ is that it’s just not fun. Something isn’t clicking and people have different ideas what. The tuning is what many people believe to be the culprit, but there’s also thea affix system revamp making every week same-y, the stupid Challenger’s Peril affix and my personal choice/opinion: the dungeon pool is the worst trash they could’ve picked for any season and especially season 1 of an expansion.
I actually hate how PvP has been turned seasonal, where everyone’s gear resets each season. I could work up to full conquest but at the start of the next season, honor gear is already better. It used to be I would just be upgrading my conquest, not completely starting over at honor every 3 months.
Difficulty can be fun, but difficulty in the form of just frustration isn’t fun.
Reading a guide and intimately understand the mechanics and how that interacts with your spec’s toolkit are vastly different things. You can get more detailed info, more than you can imagine, asking for help.
The forums get a a bad rap, but I’ve been here a long time (see my post history, helps working from home on a $140k/year salary) and people genuinely asking for help will get a TON of positive responses.
Yes, keys are harder for their rewards, because they used to be a joke and we’ve had 4 weeks of some actual parity.
And that’s different from asking for help how? You get informed that “for me when I play X spec doing Y helps” and then you try doing that and fail, just as you would if you read a guide and tried implementing the information. It’s exactly the same and you don’t have to wait for a passable answer because it’s already there. There’s also class discords where people ask these questions all the time. Honestly I only post on these forums in the vain hope that maybe Blizzard reads some of the feedback or at least has some AI distill it for them and to annoy people for fun.
DF S1 keys were also tough. But they were also actually fun to do. Now all you get is tough and not fun because the dungeons Blizzard chose for this season are garbage. Or find any other reason really, whichever fits. Point is this season feels like trash and my experience with it rn is that my friends and I get the vault done and log off to play SF6, Helldivers or Valorant instead because it’s just unpleasant to keep running.
This didn’t happen in DF S1-3. Not even once. We had fun running the keys, failing at the keys beyond our ability, stomping lower keys on alts and generally playing the game. Nobody I know wants to bother anymore.
Yes, anecdotal but that’s my experience with this season and also a form of feedback. Feel free to ignore it.
If there is anything I learned during Legion and SL. Come back near the end when the restrictions are lifted.
If difficulty != fun, then Elden Ring wouldn’t be so popular.
You live or die, succeed or fail, by your own hand in Elden Ring. That’s not the case in M+ or raids. You can play flawlessly but that one guy who can’t execute a simple mechanic like run a bomb out of the party/raid will ruin your day and/or run in the blink of an eye.
Just pay tokens for your gear.
This might sound weird but for me it’s less about difficulty and more on how specs are designed to tackle it
Balance Druid was probably bottom of the pack in SL S4(According to the logs). Then you pair that in other classes being a better pick in keys due to having a better kit it can be pretty frustrating. I stuck with it out of stubborness but I think a spec that is well balanced to play goes a long way in playing harder difficulty because I relied on Torghast to realize that
Someone earlier brought up Elden Ring. It’s a hard game, but the devs buffed greatswords to help players who built around it to feel viable when tackling difficult content. Because if they didn’t, they probably would pick a build that’s easier to play.
I apologize if I sounded off topic but that’s just how I view the difficulty aspect of WoW
Beeter Gear.
Blizzard tunned everything to higher ilvl. Elite quests, Delves etc, but locked that gear behind more difficult content. Lower level delves and quest give mediocre gear, higher level delves and keys gives better gear.
I can understand the policy harder difficulty, better gear. But essentially its not gear that matters instead is how you handle mechanics.
You can do that elite boss in delves at 580 but it requires you to perfectly do every mechanic. Even at higher ilvl its the same.
So locking gear behind harder content is silly. They have IO score to show if someone was running keys, they have pvp rating to see if someone is good at pvp. But WoW has that Ilvl policy that lets players show off that they are better than someone.
The problem is threading the needle to where content is difficult enough to engage someone, but it’s still easy enough to not feel like a wall.
A lot of people think they want difficult content, but don’t actually know what difficult content is like. They really just want to feel engaged without wiping a bunch.
Multiple levels of difficulty covets this though. And that range can be different for everyone, but that range DOES exist
There are a lot of problems with this season. I’d argue that “difficulty” isn’t even the main problem, merely one that gets talked about often because, for most players, there is currently no tangible solution to overcome that difficulty.
Meaning- If something is too difficult, you don’t just abandon it for the rest of the season and have some kind of “Zen-moment” about being a terrible player that needs to stick to terrible content. Instead, you put it off for a bit, until you get more gear, then you try it again later.
That’s how WoW works, and has worked for a very very long time.
Yet what we’re stuck with now is this incredibly awkward gearing system. On the low-end, almost anyone can get gear handed to them that they can easily cap out at 619. Then on the high-end, anything that allows you to upgrade gear past 619 has been severely gated.
There is no longer any sense of “medium-tier” progression.
You can get Champion gear from Normal raid, Mythic +2, and Delves. You can crest-cap on Runed crests doing nothing but spamming Mythic +4, and upgrade all of that Champion gear to 619.
Meanwhile the person doing Heroic Raid and mid-tier keys (5-8) is also seeing nothing but Runed crests, and also seeing their gearing options cap out at 619 (aside from a couple rare 623 pieces).
You need to do Mythic +9 or Mythic Raid in order to make the loot you got from a +7 better than the loot someone else got from a +2?
You need to do Mythic +9 or Mythic Raid in order to make loot from Heroic Raid better than loot from Normal Raid?
This is really basic stuff. It’s a gearing system where you can’t progress from Step 1 to Step 2 until you’re already farming Step 3. Meanwhile most people want to progress to Step 2 so that they can have an honest shot at Step 3.
It’s no longer a staircase, it’s a wall.
And to specifically address “difficulty” beyond just gearing; The issue is not so much whether an individual person is skilled enough to do a +9 or not. It’s really more about multiple issues coming together to create a social nightmare.
For example:
Challenger’s Peril Affix - doesn’t actually make the content itself more difficult for any individual player, but merely serves as a force multiplier for everything that is already wrong with M+. It has FORCED groups to become extremely picky about who they invite. If you have a +9 and you know that one pug player that dies a couple times could be the difference between 12 or 5 Gilded crests, then you’re probably going to wait and only invite people who play FOTM classes and overgear the content, just to be sure. No one would risk giving anyone else the chance regardless of their actual skill.
With the number of people clustering around 619, the gear at that level is quickly becoming meaningless, forcing groups to rely on things like Raider IO more than ever before. That means, in many cases, you have to waste a lot of extra time doing meaningless keys just to hope that someone invites you, when really, we’re already at or near the point where people are going to only invite others who have already been carried across that Gilded-Crest wall by others.