Tying the level of hints and direction with the difficulty could be a good alternative. Players like myself, who only want Tactician or higher, would get nothing and players who want more direction could go to classic or lower.
I'll disagree on this too. Combat and quests are different things. Tying quest hints to chosen level of combat difficulty doesn't make any sense. Just make the quest log more useful and ensure that clues you discover through dialogue are recorded in the QUEST, not only in a conversation log.