The second paragraph talks about things unrelated to the first. The pitching of a pig product (or campaign) has nothing to do with the intended difficulty of said campaign and more to do with the known shortcomings of that product (or game system) which you have to pitch anyway.
Except that that's literally what you said. You literally said you would struggle to convince your players to play in a high-difficulty campaign.
That's what made the proposal a 'pig product', in your words!
Not quite.
My argument goes more like:
1. If the rules are going to be changed, players in general hugely prefer those rules being changed in their (or their characters') favour over those rules being changed in their disfavour.
2. Most DMs discuss potential rule changes with their players ahead of time and all DMs have to inform their players of the changes once made.
3. Changing the rules in the players (or PCs') favour makes those discussions immensely easier.
4. To be changed in the players' favour the rules have to be in the players' disfavour to being with. Hence, in order to make life easier on the DMs, default the design to high difficulty and leave it to individual DMs to ease it off, either via options in the DMG or outright houserule.
I don't see the difference, being perfectly honest.
You've explained the reason why it's hard to convince players to accept this. It still comes across as: "if the game is already hard, I don't have to work to convince my players to accept it. Therefore, the game should be hard, to spare me that effort." It's...frankly, really fantastically selfish, from what I'm seeing.
We're a lot more easygoing than that. Odds are high we'd go to one of the "first choices" on the understanding that the other of us gets to pick next time.
But that then is also a compromise. Partner A made a concession, "we will go to your first choice tonight", in exchange for a different concession, "we will go to my first choice next time". Those concessions are not onerous burdens, and thus neither of them makes you unhappy. That, in particular, is part of what being "easygoing" means: making reasonable concessions doesn't make you unhappy. It leaves you neutral.
That, and the restaurant case falls under "decision that has to be made right now" on the assumption we don't want to go home hungry.
Sure. Time constraints are one of the things that is most supremely likely to convince a person to seriously and sincerely consider which concessions they're comfortable making and which concessions they aren't. As an example, I personally would prefer to go hungry rather than going to a restaurant with ultra-spicy food, because I'm a wimp when it comes to spicy food. (I like the
flavor of well-spiced food, but I do not like the
heat of heavily-spiced food.) That's a situation where making that concession would in fact actually make me unhappy. But despite the fact that I prefer Americanized Chinese food over Tex-Mex, say, that doesn't mean I don't also like Tex-Mex; I'm actually quite partial to
pollo en mole, for example. So if a friend or hypothetical SO said they wanted to go to El Indio (a local Mexican restaurant chain), and that they'd prefer to go there instead of getting chinese, I would be
happy to do that--especially if they further said, "We can go to China Garden next time, I know you like their stuff." Nothing
unhappy about making that concession.
A more common case IME would be, to use a gaming example, where two mutually-incompatible changes to a rule have been proposed and each has support from some of the table but not all. The fairly obvious compromise is to leave the rule as is and adopt neither change, but hard experience tells me to be cynical: whoever says "let's compromise by leaving it as is" (usually someone who realizes their position is currently the less-supported) is in fact punting the discussion down the road to provide time to lobby their opponents into changing their minds...or lobby enough of them at least that if it ever comes to a vote they'll win.
As I don't play the lobbying game, I've lost a lot of these over the years.
And so I've learned the hard way: when someone says "compromise" that's a huge red flag screaming settle it once, settle it now, and shut it down.
Well, firstly, that isn't a compromise then. Like that's
literally not what compromise means. Instead, that's "let's table this for now." The people saying that to you are gaslighting you. Plain and simple. I'm sorry you've had that experience, but again this is just not what the word "compromise" means. Never has been.
