Visual Novel

Damn, I should known that. 

Depends on genre.

With most action games I prefer casual, just playing the easiest.
RPGs definitely need to be easy and casual.
In puzzle and adventure games (point'n'click and such) being too easy makes it pointless.
Strategy games depends, if there's a campaign to fight through I'll do it easy, if it's just a general thing you play again and again then I go up to about medium to see what level I can still beat.
Driving games are ones that I most need difficulty with. Though in suitable amount, I do prefer to be able to finish games.

Have you tried Rally games? They are a fantastic example of how to handle difficulty in a driving game which is a genre that has the absolute cheapest difficulty settings imaginable with things like rubber banding or just slowing and speeding up cars with no nuance to the AI behaviour. The difficulty in Rally games comes from your ability to focus and get in a flow state, it's a magical experience to play at a high difficulty even if you have to slowly raise the difficulty bit by bit until you get there, nothing changes to the game but the speed you manage to take the game on at and damaging your car less to beat the decreased time.

Mods have taught me how awful most games are when it comes to difficulty.

Let's take Fallout 4 as an example. Like many games, the Bethesda way of adding "difficulty" is one dimensional. They make it so that you're easier to kill and the enemies are harder to kill. Many games throw manipulating HP into the equation but Fallout 4 does it with damage modifiers. Normal is 1 to 1 between the PC and enemy NPCs but a higher difficulty level might be .75 x player damage against 1.25 enemy damage.

In short, it turns NPCs into bullet sponges and I hate it.

Survival mode is different and brings some new factors into play but it also brings some annoyances. It was my best option, however--at least until mods came out.

Mods have given me so many more options. Think it's crazy that shooting someone in the head doesn't kill an enemy faster than shooting them in the leg? Fix that with mods. Want to use a high lethality playstyle that forces you to think tactically? Want to use some of the gear that helps against environmental damage but think the damage reduction on those pieces is ridiculous?

Mods give us options that developers SHOULD give us. When I play Fallout 4, I go with something like 1x player damage and 4x enemy damage and it's SO MUCH MORE FUN than any of the standard options. Why can't developers give us options? Why can't they give us multiple sliders and things we can check or uncheck? Mods gives us those things and provides a personalized experience.

And, seriously, I don't give a rat's fuzzy ass about the developer's "artistic vision", that's just plain arrogance and narcissism. What I care about is enjoying the game while I'm playing it, especially if I'm doing another playthrough.

Agreed. I love to see when devs put in modifiers themselves more than some difficulty slider, would love if developers work with Modders too, instead of seeing them as an enemy... like Bethesda tried to make it happen but half arsed it. 

Fair enough about not seeing the vision but can we agree that games that have set difficulty tend to be better crafted than games with a slider, difficulty wise I mean. I too care about my enjoyment and that's where my enjoyment lies, in a game where the difficulty has be finely tuned with care and attention to give me a challenge but not too much of one, to be fair and reasonable. Not too hard, not to easy. Doable by anyone with enough patience and persistence but crafted in a way that a challenge is being overcome on some level. 

I don't mind at all. I enjoy Visual Novels a lot.

Basically this. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a challenge, sometimes I'm in the mood for a power trip, and sometimes I'm in the mood for some stressless, mindless fun. The best difficulty setting I've ever seen in an action game is in Hades. The difficulty is so granular that you can choose what specific types of challenges you want to deal with at the moment and what you're not in the mood for, and you can change it after each run. That means you're not stuck with your choices for the entirety of your playthrough.

The choices are things like number of enemies in a room, movement speed of enemies, how much damage enemies deal, whether or not you have a time limit to clear sections of the game, whether or not bosses have extra moves, how much health enemies have, and so on. I think all games should rip off this system going forward and it should become industry standard.

If it's a sandbox game focused more in customization and simulation mechanics I'm OK with easy games. Bulding and life Sims falls here

Otherwise no patience for easy games. Tend to get bored of them really fast. I can't even play action games nowadays because everytime I play they I just think "This is so easy compared to Souls, better to go back and play Souls". I think I've dropped almost every action RPG I've played in the last 2-3 years because felt their mechanics were too shallow and combat too easy. When I try more difficult settings I realize it's just the enemiesbecoming damage sponges, instead of harder it just became slower (and even more boring)

Sometimes the game is designed on Hard Mode and they actually dumb it down on Normal mode. In Fire Emblem since Awakening is very much clear "Hard" is the actual designed difficulty, with "Normal" is the easy difficulty