Let's address this head on. In your first reply, include your age, general yearly income, and job - as my hypothesis is that this is mainly a function of that.
I understand what you are trying to prove here, in fact, from memory (I would have to go looking to actually find the relevant studies), you would be correct. If I am guessing correctly, your hypothesis is that younger people who make less money but have more time on their hands due to not having as many obligations (children, etc), care far more about balance than older people who have much more limited time to play. I won't indulge your fancy because I value my privacy to some extent, but I will say that for the purposes of your little experiment you should also require people to state the country they live in, because the US and the UK are not the only countries in the world and you need to adjust the income based on the cost of living depending on the country the person lives in. Someone living in Harare will have a lower cost of living than someone living in San Francisco.
Now, I get the idea of the game being balanced and difficult for a vanilla playthrough at the normal difficulty level - but I've seen so damn many people claiming that if a player is allowed to do this - or that - that it breaks game balance. If this were a multiplayer game where other players doing things that are highly rewarding for them and it was at your expense - such as with a sports game where players will abuse exploits to beat you every time - it would make perfect sense to me. However, when we are all playing single player, why should it bother you if I can mug some noble to get a quick 10,000 gold or steal some magic item that gives a character all 20 stats? If I can save before doing something and grind out a good result, it might not be realistic, but how does it bother you if you don't do it? Why are you obsessed with everyone else playing the game the exact same way you are playing it?
For me, life is a daily grind and I've been playing it at nightmare difficulty for 20 years. I play games as a form of escape from that daily grind and if I'm not playing some MMORPG I am likely to cheat like crazy. It gives a level of control over my temporary reality that I am denied in my daily life - I'm more interested in exploring a game than having any extreme challenge. I don't need frustration added into my life - I've got plenty and all the health problems that come with chronic stress.
I personally take somewhat of a middle road here, I feel that some degree of balance is important, but that an excessive focus on balance can lead to a lower quality product overall. A good example of why balance can be important is a thought experiment with a hypothetical game where 1 class deals on average 1 damage and another class deals on average 100 damage. Now, as a game designer you can either choose to balance combat around the class that does 1 damage or the class that does 100 damage, but without rebalancing the classes themselves, you cannot balance around both of them. If you design encounters around the 1 damage class, the 100 damage class will find them trivial to overcome. Conversely, if you balance around the 100 damage class, then the 1 damage class has to deal with impossible walls of difficulty.
Anyhow, I could write walls of text to support either side, but I think its better to just provide a link to someone who articulates well why balance is important in single player games, someone like
Josh Sawyer. Incidentally, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 (games he was responsible for) are examples of games where I feel like too much emphasis was placed on balance and it was to their overall detriment. I also place a much higher emphasis on verisimilitude than he does and I do believe that trash options have their place, but those are just personal digressions.
