May I ask: How much of of the difficutly ease was due to being able to select Persona abilities? I haven't played Golden, only the original, and I can imagine being able to select abilities breaks the game hard if you know what to select.
That shouldn't change the difficulty at all. You couldn't select anything you couldn't roll in the original anyways, so all that selecting did was remove the inconvenience of having to exit the fusion menu and then re-enter it to reset the random abilities.