I think that mining should be difficult, because it requires a lot of hardware knowledge, but also to buy and regular maintenance, and personally, it should be difficult to make money through mining, because there are already many mines.
Even posting in forum can be difficult if one lacks the knowledge of how things work in this industry and I think the hard part of mining ends with affordability. Anyone with good enough hardware, should be able to make more profit compared with bounty campaigns and there's nothing like mining is already saturated! What you need is the latest hardware and interestingly, there are also countless of coins to mine.