eh,both sides have good points and bad ones.
for my personal taste,difficulty, is a necessity, or at least the game must not be piss poor easy,because it detracts from the experience..you can have the tighter gameplay in the world,you still need to give to the player a reason to use it to its fullest.
I always make the example with football (the real one,not handegg)..it's a great sport for those who like it,both to practice and watch...but what happens if we destroy the difficulty of the game by, i don't know, making the goal as big as the penalty area? now it becomes way less enjoyable to play and to watch,scoring becomes too easy, it doesn't take much skill so it isn't fun for who plays and doesn't impress who watches.
but that being said, does the existance of some lower difficulty setting that makes the game piss poor easy for someone else hurt my enjoyment? of course not, as far as my level of difficulty is still there ,go ahead and put it in the game if you want.
problem is, that's not at all where the industry is going....and it's not in favor of difficult games.
Easy games made to be played by "anyone" are by a large margin the norm right now,and there is no hard version of them for people that wants a challenge either.
That's why i kind of understand the "eletists"...not wanting an easy mode looks to me less like a douchebag move to feel superior to others, and more like a defensive response to the vast number of historical franchises that have lowered their difficulties to sell more to the "masses"...
it's the slippery slope argument basically, they think that this time is gonna be an easy mode,next time the game's difficulty will be rebalanced in total to make it more accessible...it's a gut response sure..but not entirely unmotivated given the current direction the industry is following.
long story short,yes,a more accessible level of difficulty in an hard game hurts no one, but you can't blame people that like hard games to be defensive about their small niche when the entirety of the industry is rowing against them and has been doing it for years.
about the reviews, yes, games should be reviewed by reviewers that know how to play them. I don't know why it's even considered debatable.