On the other hand, a lot of games now are large and diverse with hours worth of content/art, instead of 5 minutes of content constant replayed for hours until the button patterns are memorized.
Gran Turismo (first version, on Playstation one) was hard. It was good, but it was hard.
Later versions (GT4 especially) were much easier, with many more races and tracks and cars. But is it more fun? Is it fun for advanced players to grind through easy races? (even with weird features to increase difficulty and earnings from races?)