I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what is reasonable on normal difficulty, Brian Wright.
I expect normal difficulty to be the level at which players who are not expert but competent at the game have a fun and slightly challenging experience, hard to be the difficulty where experts have a fun and slightly challenging experience, and easy to be the difficulty where rookies have a fun and slightly challenging experience.
Thus when a rookie - even one who is a veteran of the genre - plays on normal difficulty, he should expect to risk defeat, even in fairly early battles, and certainly when facing boss encounters like the one discussed here, where you are thrown curveballs as part of the encounter scripting that you have no way of knowing of and hence preparing for before the fight starts.
The genre veteran is likely to be ready for normal difficulty considerably faster than other game rookies who are genre rookies too, and hard difficulty much faster, but there'll always be an initial learning curve, whether it be minutes or hours needed to surmount based on the mechanics of the individual game and the nature of the player.
As for losing a lot of players due to the difficulty curve in the game, you may be right; It is a very hard thing for me to understand players who give up on games over something like difficulty rather than improving their gameplay or adjusting the difficulty setting to a lower level when they are in over their head (the latter option being available at any time and not requiring a game restart), out of some misguided belief that the game should allow them to succeed at the difficulty level they've chosen, but they do exist and I have no idea how common they are.
