The youtube-video
"Let's Play my own Game: Emerald City by Dave Gilbert" talks a lot about how he tried to make that game accessible to the casual audience, while he doesn't talk specifically about the concept of difficulty-options it sure is a shocking eye-opener for how the casual audience will react when they play an adventure-game.
For example in one case there was a huge pop-up on screen asking you which action you wish to take where many casual testers would get stuck because they would click around the entire screen EXCEPT for that huge centered pop-up.
This has led me to believe that reaching out to a casual audience is NOT a easy job, and thus despite my opinion being that I dislike difficulty-options I'm starting to at least consider it being a necessary evil, so I'll be following this thread with an interested eye.
But my general view is that is a puzzle is bad QUALITY then you can still get away with it if the difficulty of it is just right (not too easy, not too hard), and thus difficulty-options simply allows the developer to get away with bad quality-puzzles as the player might think sub-counciously
"that puzzle didn't make much sense, but since I completed it within reasonible time-frame I'm not going to complain".
