Another part of this revisionism is the Auric changes when the mission grid redesign dropped.
TLDR: Auric broke for some reason when they dropped sedition and Auric Heresy. We did our best to convince the devs of this via Julia, who was a great champion and voice for us, esp regarding forced campaign quickplay being awful.
Even though I was mostly satisfied after the campaign quickplay issue was resolved, I still, to this day, don’t truly understand the “baked in HI-INT” system.
I also still feel like Auric never reached the same difficulty as it was before this patch.
And that was all before the additional powercreep, so it would have only gotten worse.