I get what they're trying to do with the difficulty. I just find it hard to get into games where I know that one wrong move will put me straight back to the beginning. I get kind of annoyed at how deplorably easy contemporary platformers like New Super Mario Bros are as well but I'm not a great fan of the polar opposite either.

As for the RPG analogy, I think they're kind of comparing apples with oranges but since it was obviously a joke they probably didn't mean it to be a serious comparison anyway.