Yeah Heroic is by far the best balance between all the factors. You can pick up Heroic without a deep knowledge of the game and still have an enjoyable but challenging time.

And Breath of the Wild already had a terrible difficulty system even in Normal mode. The durability system is designed to force you to constantly hard gimp yourself so you can save "good weapons" for bigger moments. Not only using subpar equipment, but taking up more and more inventory slots with stuff you are hesitant to use because you know it'll break instantly once you do.

Its just not super noticeable because the game is so easy that you aren't really hard challenged much. If you aren't getting one shot, you are usually not in any danger and will eventually whittle down anything.

I think most numbers systems are bad, because usually they are made on the coding side without consideration for how they actually play. A lot of companies have admitted they don't even play test their highest difficulty levels. Sometimes this creates emergent strategies, often times it leads to the Legendary restrictions I mentioned earlier.

And its not just the number systems becoming too hard, it can happen in the opposite. Games that are too easy numerically never let you engage with to learn the systems or get good at them because you never need to and its wasteful to pretend to try. You see this a lot with bad tutorial modes/zones, or even games where "the post game is the real game." Halo on Easy or even Normal suffers from this a lot.

Heroic Halo really was a perfect balance, its a shame it took them until like Reach to say "this is the intended version" because I think most people default to Normal because it says Normal.