Purple drop rate?

That's fair, I did imply a false dichotomy there.

That being said, I think that we're using different definitions of difficulty here. Personally, I don't find missions which require you to escort a hostage you find in the last room of the map back to the beginning without any ambushes more challenging that ones that just let you defeat everything around them and move on. In fact, I don't get any gratification at all out of escort missions like that, but I realize that's subjective.

I find time sinks like extremely low drop rates off of completely random mobs to be an unappealing collision of real-world difficulty with in-game difficulty. When I did the Tin Mage TF for the first time I found it more difficult than other TFs because the enemies are higher level, do more damage, and punish me much more consistently than others I'd seen before. That, to me, is game difficulty.

The only thing hard about coping with the low drop rates of purples is that if you want to get them, you start having to struggle with rescheduling real life events to make time to do so. So really the challenge of getting a full set of purples from fighting has very little to do with the game and everything to do with eating a shorter dinner, staying home instead of going out, and that sort of thing. That, to me, is real-world difficulty.

But really this is all kind of silly to talk about because we all know the only realistic way to get purples has very little to do with fighting bad/good guys. If you want good items you need to marketeer. Even if they tripled the drop rate you still wouldn't realistically be able to build your own sets off of drops, so unless you define using the market as difficult, I don't see how the difficulty is impacted in any meaningful way.