Guess you had enough time to stalk through my posts in another thread to call me deluded and worth medical study, but searching through his post history was just too much effort. You even seem to be a mindreader, maliciously divining my feeling about people more “skilled” than me. Good for them, don’t really care how skilled you are at a leisure activity. What I do care is their efforts to get preferential reward schemes.
You also don’t seem to understand how difficulty itself is a penalty on the player. When you raise difficulty, mob poise increases, their aggression increases, and mob count increases, so it’s not just enemy strength, but the tax on your health for misplay, causing greater consumption of resources to either heal up the damage, or requiring more investment on gear optimization to overcome difficult parts of an Unspoken playthrough.
Raising rewards flattens that difficulty. If you get more gear or materials, your power spike comes online earlier, and this has nothing to do with early access or 1.0. Thomas himself has stated that a way to nerf the content naturally is through farming levels and gear upgrades. Increased rewards do just that, just as the previous increased experience did.
Moreover, you are only approaching this question from the perspective of an Unspoken player that has the alternative of playing and clearing quicker on easier difficulty. What you don’t grasp is that the player who actually needs medium or easy difficulty does not clear the content quicker than the skilled player who plays on Unspoken.
Skilled/Hardcore players regardless of difficulty clear content faster than medium/easy difficulty players, for the simple reason that people who play these modes are more experienced, optimize more, and play longer to develop strategies that get them time gains.
This is replicated regardless of game type. Grab a Mythic + or mythic raid WoW player or Savage difficulty FFXIV raider, or a Challenger LoL player or WoW arena player. They all clear higher difficulty raids, M+ keys and climb pvp ladders quicker at higher difficulties than the time it takes mediocre players to do considerably less difficult content within the game.
So what you’re asking is that players who already have an efficiency advantage be given an even larger advantage as compensation for their self inflicted efficiency handicap (difficulty choice given their skill level).
You simply disregard the way the average medium and easy difficulty player clears content, and are introducing a wrong benchmark for why the gap between Unspoken and other difficulties in reward should be widened.
This is even worse when coop comes into the mix, because now the incentive for bigger rewards introduces into the group dynamic a tension toward pulling members of a group toward higher difficulties to compensate for the coop loot limitations.
Historically in most games, introducing different reward schemes opens a pandora’s box for neverending demands for those gaps to be addressed one way or another by the affected groups. Setting the standard of one reward scheme across the game sidesteps that and makes the choice of difficulty an opt-in instead of a pressure. They took the right approach.