Look, you complained about gatekeeping, and about the community. This is a bona fide attempt from someone in the community to ask you to set aside your preconceptions and take another look at what the game is trying to say.
If it doesn’t gel with you, well then maybe it really just isn’t for you - and that’s fine. Not every game is for every person. But changing a bunch of difficulty sliders isn’t going to fix that.
> I don't think that's quite a good comparison -- because leveling up is literally a method to overcome the difficulty. Grind. Get Good. Kill some foes, run back to the bonfire. Kill them again, run back to the bonfire.
I don't know how that can be interpreted any other way than "do a repetitive and boring thing until your stats are higher."
I've played all three Dark Souls games as well as Bloodbourne to completion. I switched from xbox to PC for DS1 because I had the original unpatched disk and got frustrated in Lost Izalith. I'm very confident that I would have had more fun if it took me four attempts to beat O&S rather than 20.
I guess just the last thing I would say is that one thing that ER tries to communicate to you early on is that, if something is frustrating you, don’t keep banging your head against a wall. Heed that advice: go away, explore, learn, come back later. With a new perspective it will look different.
But I was just told to grind to level up to make the game easier. That isn't putting in insane hours for fun. That is saying "if you want to beat O&S, go spend a bunch of hours killing knights in Anor Londo for hours."