So during the beta there were a ton of bosses that straight up just kicked my @ss and all the quests with bribe lines were expensive and enticed you to find alternate ways to progress, among other things.
While I am a glutton for punishment and had often complained about each time ZOS decided to make the game easier, I understand other players were complaining about the opposite.
So for a compromise, I would like to have a way to set the difficulty myself that would only effect me versus solo content (to avoid causing problems in group dungeons, pvp, and endgame).
As someone who gets a huge sense of accomplishment out of completing a game on its highest offered difficulty (started with "veteran" mode on World at War. Skyrim set to Legendary is fun too), I need to get my difficulty fix off of my solo content to make it more enjoyable while doing simple things like pushing from level 1 to 50.
Getting killed by a solo boss a bunch of times gets me to start thinking about new ways to approach a fight, and winning that fight makes me a better player.
I suppose I could just solo all the world bosses but I did that already. It's one thing to get a difficult fight whenever I can make room out of easy questing but it's another to have a challenge all the way through.
"but NotSo, why would anybody want to be slowed down by a difficulty gate on their way to level 50?"
I propose that the higher difficulty also comes with a very slight boost to experience or quest reward (not to be taken advantage of by flipping the difficulty up when you turn in quests. Difficulty must be set the whole time from when you pick the quest up, to when you turn it in). Or you could leave that out altogether, I just want a harder game.
Also, don't tell me to just go iron mode and beat the campaign while naked and disarmed.

Time to stop phone typing.
THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT

EDIT:
I suppose to convince folks to get into it, there could be an achievement for a character going from level 1 to level 50 with the highest difficulty mode.