But it also doesn't need to be difficult for some kind of gamer street cred.

Easy to play hard to master, everyone can play but there is a big gap between regular players and the best players.

That's wasn't the intention, the intention was make the game difficult enough that being good actually means something.

To condense, good players should feel their skill means something and that they can continue to improve without maxing out, but new players should still win sometimes and be able to enjoy themselves.

Also, mute buttons for 9 year olds.

Did I miss anything?

No, I think that's pretty much it.

A high skill barrier solves pretty much all problems.

The game should be rewarding and relatively easy depending on how good you and your team communicates.
e.g. One very skilled assault marine shouldn't be a problem for a team of relatively new players using teamwork.

Can't find much to disagree on there.

I think we all just see different ways of doing that.

I would not want it to be easy to play. Rather normal or average. And HARD to master.

Why is difficulty so prestigious? The 'easy to play but hard to master' thing seems perfectly acceptable. Basic play and tactics are easy but actually getting into the meat of the game is more difficult.

I'm not sure if people just want to be above casual gamers at any cost or what

With the risk of sounding older than I actually am, I have to say I'm leaning towards thinking a bit like the OP.
Don't get me wrong, I'm far from an elitist when it comes to gaming. I'm just tired of seeing the whole "effort vs reward" concept being bashed to death. A nice little example here would be a game called Tribes 2.
In T2, for those that missed it, you had a jetpack, 3 weight classes, and corresponding amounts of weaponry, and up to 32 players on the opposite team who would like nothing better than to tear you apart the instant they saw you.

Now, being torn to pieces by exploding blue frisbees over and over again isn't anyone's idea of fun, so of course there were ways to avoid this. Moving around, "skiing" (using a function of the jetpack to 'ski' along the ground, a very important concept in the Tribes games) and so on. This was enough to at least avoid a direct hit from whatever the enemy was shooting at you with. Now.. Here's where my point begins to matter.
Some people decided they were tired of people avoiding their blue explosive frisbees, and began to train.
This resulted in "skilled" people being able to, more times than not, hit someone who was flying at 150 km/h (I'm using metric. So sue me.). All it took was a lot of training, getting familiar with the physics and ballistics of the game, and wanting to kill the enemy badly enough to make the time invested in training worth it.

The way gaming is today, in my eyes, is too many people not wanting to invest even a fraction of that time in training, and still be rewarded by being able to do similar things to those who do take the time to get better through practice. While far from everyone has the time to train themselves to fully master any game, there should at least be some elements that require a modicum of training to utilize properly, or at least effectively.
So, having been long-winded enough to probably bore half of you into insanity, let me summarize:

Some things should be earned, not given for whining 'it's too hard' to the developers. This doesn't mean I think the game should have dwarf fortress levels of difficulty, it means that to be excellent, you should need to train for it.