I have said this already in this thread, but the fundamental experience of a difficult game is overcoming adversity. The combat, world, RPG, and character building systems do stand on their own obviously and are huge reasons I love the game. That being said lowering the difficulty would adversely affect all of these systems. If you were to take less damage the game might be criticized in the minds of those for being hacknslash. Dodging would be less important and therefore grabbing the heaviest item and swinging it around haphazardly would be a viable strategy. And who knows what other repercussions there might be.
If you were to not lose souls upon death you could be as aggressive as possible show an utter disregard for the games systems and never truly be punished other than lost time. Literally you could just keep leveling up with the xp gained from failed attempts and go further and further into the level without losing anything because the way the game works is that death doesn't reset you to a save point it keeps the world as it was and that includes items. The game encourages risk versus reward gameplay by deciding if going for a heavily guarded item is to much of gambit and risk losing your souls. Take that away and you just charge every item with no consequence. The joy of unlocking a shortcut would be heavily undercut by the fact that there were never really any stakes to not finding it. So then would the system have to be reworked to support the lack of lost souls? Have simply a reset state that the game goes back to? That would take away from the experience the one that people were claiming an easy mode would allow to have.
"Getting the experience" is one of the most misleading things you could tell yourself about a potential easy mode because the experience would at it's core be fundamentally different without the intended difficulty spikes.
By splitting the community of people who played the "correct" difficulty versus playing the easy mode would have these extremes where people say the game needed this thing to be better, then upon finding out they played on easy they are now subject to the fact that they didn't play it on the intended difficulty and thus their criticism is invalid. Which depending on circumstance may actually be true.
Maybe there are more creative ways at lowering the difficulty, redefining every encounter manually to make each one individually easier? How much work would that be?
Is it so awful that a game have an entry barrier? Why does a game have to be for everyone?
If a person thinks Dark Souls looks fun but they don't think they can do it, I think they can. I believe they are capable. It may be frustrating at first but then they will come to love it.
