Okay. Lemme give you another example I'm more familiar with, and explain how difficulty can actually -compound- problems. Even if you hate difficulty being the cause you cant deny it has an impact on the example I'm about to bring up.

Champions online is a silver age superhero type game. Originally released as a sub model, ported to free to play, and sold to another dev, it had a fremium model where paying a sub allowed you to build a character where you could pick your characters powers to a insane degree. Naturally, theorycrafting was through the roof, but the game languished for years without balance changes or new content. Then, Telios Ascendant hit. A new dungeon built from the ground up to be, new difficult content in the traditional MMO style, something the game had never done and had generally not tried before.

It bombed. For a few reasons. The first, is that the game was never -about- difficult content, it was about being a superhero, and most of the people who kept the game alive generally stuck around to be rediculously broken in both PVE and PVP, and nobody had any interest in frustration for hours on end. I ran with friends and we all concluded the update was 'hot garbage' and never ran again.

Then, there was the problem of the difficulty versus player means. It was essentially designed in such a way that only minmaxers expoiting the sub model and abilities it gave, could compete. You were boned, as any of the free classes, or even paid ones.

Finally, there was the sheer grind to get -anything- from it.

How does this relate to ESO? With the game being more and more cash-shop focused these days it might exaserbate the problem, real or imagined, of ESO's pay to win. This is the surest way to gut it and there is no bones about this. If the playerbase -thinks- it's going pay to win, and you can give legitimate cause to assume it might be, people will be gone. So if they go ahed and make the overland difficult, a stupid idea in and of itself, it could have a domino effect in addition to the ground zero effect of, say, people geting frustrated and leaving. And oh they will.

TLDR: In addition to being a stupid idea and not geting rid of bots, combined with the current buisness model focus, a case could legitimately be made that ZOS could be leaning into the pay to win market due to things that have happened before, and alsbolutely murder buisness. It's not a good idea in any way, shape, or form. And like many people have said in the thread allready it's being pruposed by a selfish minority. Terrible idea. Shouldn't be considered.