Determining whether it’s easy or not to rank-up is a subjective matter, but objectively it stills doesn’t seem like a simple thing to achieve, be it for whatever set of underlying reasons. This is a summary of the accounts, created in 2017, that have been merited at some point, and have ranked-up at least one level:
Theoretically, all those accounts have had the time to rank-up to Legendary (perhaps the trailing December 2017 created accounts still need another cycle in the worst case scenario). The numbers indicate that only 0,74% of those accounts have made it to Legendary, and 0,95% to Hero Member. Seems a pretty small subset of those 2017 created and merited accounts (I don' track unmerited ones).
Now, of course, there are many factors that play here: available time, stamina, expressiveness, the treated topics, novelty, and so forth, so we can’t really distinguish in the numbers those accounts really made the effort from those that didn’t, but even so, from an objective point of view, the numbers seem smallish to me, and don’t stand behind a need to increase rank difficulty.
Theoretically, all those accounts have had the time to rank-up to Legendary (perhaps the trailing December 2017 created accounts still need another cycle in the worst case scenario). The numbers indicate that only 0,74% of those accounts have made it to Legendary, and 0,95% to Hero Member. Seems a pretty small subset of those 2017 created and merited accounts (I don' track unmerited ones).
Now, of course, there are many factors that play here: available time, stamina, expressiveness, the treated topics, novelty, and so forth, so we can’t really distinguish in the numbers those accounts really made the effort from those that didn’t, but even so, from an objective point of view, the numbers seem smallish to me, and don’t stand behind a need to increase rank difficulty.