No. It chases the hashrape away. It never gets to 60x. Don't worry about that. It needs to be 12%.
If it's less the swings will be worse because the hashrape will last longer and the difficulty will be higher at the peak. If it's more they will also be worse, because it will allow the difficulty to jump TOO fast.
Envy - I know it's Superbowl weekend, but we need folks working together, not being armchair quarterbacks. Where where you the past month when we were actually testing this?

Keep in mind, everybody, that we are 35 days old, the original dev basically dropped everything on the community, and we had to pick-up the dev process from scratch while building a new team in the middle of a crisis. CAT's in very good hands, the community is stronger than ever, the PR folks are kicking ass, and we've been recognized by an Oprah reality show.
Yes, we still have the seat belt sign fastened - we're not in smooth air yet - but we're alive, we're growing, and we're standing up to hopping pools - and we no longer need to extend our claws to hang-on.

Life's good and getting better, Catfolks!
Andy
I was watching here with interest as the dev process unfolded, but not about to jump into the drama that discussion turned into. The current system is certainly working, and should be run for a while to see just how stable it can get, but could be tweaked just a bit for stability.
I'm an engineer with some dynamic systems modeling experience, and I'm willing to do some predictive modeling of difficulty response for future tweaks, if you are interested.
Getting a fast response to spikes, while keeping the difficulty reasonably stable, is a difficult proposition. I think there are a few non-conventional solutions (such as lowering the difficulty BETWEEN blocks if blocktime exeeds an hour or so). There are also simple solutions that would tweak the current response, such as weighting the 36-block average so that recent blocktimes have more weight than older ones.