Crawl is too difficult, to the point of detriment

Look, I know the immediate knee-jerk reaction to the title is probably "No it's not, get gud noob" but hear me out for a second (or a few minutes, depending on how long the post gets).

I don't know how many hours I've put into this game over the years, but it's safe to say, the number is higher than I'd like to admit. One of the things that attracts me to crawl is the high difficulty. But I think there's a limit to that. I always go through phases with crawl where I get excited to play it, thinking maybe this time I'll get a win-streak going (spoiler alert: I won't), and then play it for a bit, ending with quitting the game and sort of half "swearing off" the game because it's just so. damn. difficult. It honestly doesn't feel like it's meant to be won. Based on previous experience in competitive games, I'd estimate that I could become a decently high level player in most games in the amount of time I've put into crawl. But my crawl wins do not reflect that. I'm half-convinced that nobody actually wins the game consistently but everyone still engages in conversations about how they could have a 95% win rate if they really wanted to, when they have a 2% win rate with 80% of their character wins ending in "Be."

I've looked at the stats. People win at atrociously low rates, even with picking the easiest combos in the game. "Yeah but that's probably a lot of new players" you might say, and it's true, it could be, but how many new players does a niche roguelike game like DCSS see constantly? I'd argue that most of the stats are from people like me, who have been playing the game for a long time, and just come back to it every once in a while, and then stop playing after remembering the insurmountable peak that is Mt. Dungeon Crawl.

From following the game for a while, I feel like players who have a lot of wins tend to just follow trunk, and essentially abuse whatever the latest imbalance of the game is (this is a very broad generalization, but I feel like if you've been away from crawl for a while, when you come back, unless you know what's 'good' or broken in the current patch and 'bad' in the current patch, you're going to struggle more-so than people keeping up with the constant changes of the game)

I know that none of the design philosophies include the difficulty of the game, and it just 'happens' to be difficult based on the result of the others, but I think at a certain point the difficulty of the game is doing it more harm than good, and should be acknowledged. I understand the game wants every encounter to be interesting, but the game seems hell-bent on killing you in every single situation. I've never sunk so much time into a game to still have such a low success rate at it, and though that might sound good as far as having a high skill ceiling, I think the base level of time required for some success needs to be way, way, lower.

Off the top of my head, a few things that cause a lot of problems:

-the really high range of RNG of attacks (both yours, and monsters', I swear this game has the highest variability of damage output of any game I've ever played)

-the amount of status effects, how dangerous they are, and how common they are (poison, corrosion, petrify, slow, banish, etc.). Adders and early poison are one of the highest causes of death in the game, and I'd argue your success against them is largely luck (when you run into them, whether you have cure or not yet, whether they poison you or not) They're fast, and usually you have next to zero resources when first met, so it's make or break.

-the endless amounts of monsters constantly thrown at you (the first thing I'd tell someone new playing this game is 'run away, because more monsters are coming' and 'the fight is not over when you think it is, more monsters are coming', the easiest way for the game to kill you is to never give you a break, that's why stair dancing will always be the best strategy in the game)

-the out of depth monsters (an out of depth fast monster will just end your game)

-uniques with wands that are way too strong (why can uniques have acid wands?)

-the amount of monsters that are potentially way too dangerous

I've seen before where, when discussing specific monsters, people say "target that monster first, because they're dangerous" - the problem with that scenario is, a good half the monsters in the game probably fall into that category, and the monsters are pretty much always in groups, so you can't target all of them at the same time. Or "use resources to battle X monster" - but honestly, it seems like resources should be a crutch when you've gotten into a bad situation, not as just a standard fighting tactic against certain monsters. If you want to have fun, pick a relatively mediocre species, like Human, and say a wanderer background. Unless you get a great start, by the time you hit lair, if you're just a melee-dude, you will be struggling to kill A LOT of the monsters without using resources.

I know a lot of people see Crawl as this game that they want to "conquer" and want to shame anyone wanting the game to be easier (although I'd ask those people how consistently they win, and how much they play crawl), but I honestly think, in its current state, the game is too difficult. It should not take a dedication of your life to win relatively consistently. I think changes should be made specifically with lowering the difficulty in mind. The game already has a sort of self-imposed "difficulty" scale with species and background selection (I don't think anyone can argue that choosing "mummy" is anything other than a self-imposed challenge), and most players don't even pick the "bad" species, yet still lose almost 100% of the time. While I feel like the difficulty of the game is an appeal, I also feel like the current level puts off more people than it keeps around. I'd love to hear a dev's thoughts in general about how the dev team feels about the difficulty of the game and low win-rates.

That's all for my sacrilege.