As for the difficulties and difficulties I thing you grossly underestimate the popularity of both easy and hard modes. A LOT of players gravitate either towards always playing on the hardest possible settings or the easiest. In the balance of things I would not be surprised if fewer play on normal than Exploration and Tactician combined even if Normal normal has the highest count of any individual difficulty players.
Totally agree. I have no idea how typical I am, but with most games, I generally start in story mode, just to get a sense of all the systems, understand how everything works, etc., then mostly at normal, and eventually only do one or two playthroughs in hard mode just to get a sense of what's considered "hard". Then after that, almost always in story mode because at that point I'm just trying to see what happens with choices I didn't make in earlier playthroughs
