I've been listening to this sometimes while playing roguelikes. I often end up disagreeing, but hearing other perspectives has opened my eyes to some things.
I distinctly remember beating Angband. It was such a stressful experience that I really didn't want to go through with it a second time.
One part of me thinks it's amazing that a game can inspire those kind of feelings. That's something really special, though often not intentional.
On the other hand, when there is an implicit promise that each new game I intend to seriously attempt will pull some dirty tricks, it makes me think twice.
Even the "easy" roguelikes make it a point to be extraordinarily difficult, so much so that their own developers often don't bother to beat them. A sin in any other genre.
I have one theory as to why this is. So many roguelikes, in an attempt to extend their longevity, end up catering heavily to their expert cult-following.
I'll rattle off a few examples of the kind of thing I mean:
The developer of Moria had made it a point to "fix" the various strategies that people used to beat the game. A common practice today.
DCSS is continuing it's content cleansing to remain fun for its more exploitative experts, who are intent to keep playing like a machine would.
Nethack goes on with it's myriad of seemingly requisite spoilers and insider knowledge, as does Angband to a frustrating degree.
There is an old running joke in the IVAN community that beating the game is a bug that just hasn't been fixed yet.
Even in rogue, I remember hearing the developers altering the game so as to make it difficult for the rogomatic to beat.
What's next? Some kind of impossibly sadistic roguelike designed around TAS? If it exists, some neckbeard out there will master it and hog the developers.
You can beat plenty of smaller games relatively inexperienced, but even then "relatively" means the developers expectation of at least a month of solid play before cracking it.
At some point it becomes an issue of if a game even deserves to be as difficult as it is. That is, the difficulty detracts from a game already dealing poorly with repetition.
It can become a kind of a "buyers remorse" trap. Sure, you can always give up on the game, but you won't feel good having invested all those hours into nothing...
So you are stuck with a boring game. At times it might feel safer to just avoid the crowd because of this, and not invest much time in anything too poorly documented. Just in case.
This is one, more unfortunate, reason why I think roguelikes are such an addictive genre of games. A lot of the games are simply bad, but we carry on to justify a time investment.
I sometimes wish I could find more roguelikes that just drop all pretenses and act like any other RPG but within a procedural, permadeath, roguelike world.
It doesn't seem like too much to ask for, but barring 7 day roguelikes (which I have other problems with), it's like a vast wasteland of difficulty, with few gems.
Old games were fine being this hard when you would only have a small library, but when there is all of roguebasin to explore, it gets exhausting churning out the victories.
Yeah, it's very satisfying to long ponder a games philosophy, and even better to finally beat it and hear the lamentations of the developers. But there is such a thing as wearing out your welcome.
Some people can beat a certain game with every race, every class, every conduct, and all while only wielding a sock. But things shouldn't be designed around that crowd so often.
It seems logical to cater to your most dedicated fans, especially when they might be your last, but at the same time it has probably hurt the genre as a whole.
I still don't want to change what has already happened. Every roguelike in existence is special in its own way, and has its own riddles and lessons, and that's a big part of why I love this genre.
Maybe it would just be nice if I could catch a break more often. There is some point where you must admit the game has run its course and the player (and maybe even developer) should move on.
