I'm not disagreeing with you. 'Scary' and 'hard' becomes an issue when that's all that's being said about math. Video games are 'scary' and 'hard' but... they're also fascinating and fun. The popular math narrative is incomplete unlike video games. Why is that? Dr. Eugenia Cheng says it much better and has a good answer as to why [1].

[1] http://www.pbs.org/video/math-is-amazing-and-we-have-to-star...