If you actually own a miner that isn't able to connect to the pool due to difficulty settings, there should be plenty of methods to tweak that locally too.
the share diff is set by the pool
[snip]
I want to be clear, I didn't mean users could change what the pool does.
But this user claimed his miner's software wasn't even letting him connect to the pool to start hashing.
I highly doubt any miner's software would be so restrictive. But ok, even if we take the claim for granted.
Probably running miners with a different firmware would make such issue ok.
But they didn't even mention a miner model or firmware so it's hard to actually believe this.