Can’t you already influence that difficulty though by choosing the difficulty you start on? So far I’ve found that it is your starting gear that is more influential on how difficult the start is, rather than your traits (unless they’re utterly abysmal, which rarely happens). The difficulty setting changes nothing beyond your starting gold, so you’re essentially deciding how good your start is going to be. I’ve been finding myself appreciate that more and more. It’s a very elegant solution.
I think that the difficulty also changes the cost of items overall throughout the game, but I’m not certain about that. Difficulty right now only really affects the early game, since after a few large battles you get to a point where the starting conditions become irrelevant. There’s not really enough content and focus to the game at this point to know how hard it will end up being, so discussions about difficulty balancing are probably premature.
I do think that having a little more choice about starting conditions would help quell some of the dissatisfaction people have with a random start, without hurting the game’s theme too much. I do agree that it’s probably ultimately unnecessary though; more a concession to modern expectations about game design than a required feature.
