The point of Hardcore mode is to play on the ranked seasonal ladders where you get permanent rewards for high scores, which means raising the difficulty.

"Games aren't hard if you lower the difficulty" is a strange argument to make.

Actually, the real secret to Diablo 3 HC is that characters are completely disposable, and only the equipment matters.

You can take a level 70 weapon with a gem of ease, jump in at Torment VI and level a new character from 1->20 in sixty seconds even when playing solo.

If you're optimizing for not dying, that sounds great. If you're optimizing for a good time and a difficult challenge then that's not going to work.

>had 1 close call due to Frozen

Let it go.

That's probably a metaphor for reality.