It sounds perfectly fine to me and don't listen to the meme, it's one of my least favorite Touhou memes. After Sakuya being a sadist to Meiling and Alice being completely pathetic and utterly insane.

Anyway, Touhou is not only hard, it generally focuses on a different playstyle than most shooters with memorization and habit being more important than reflexes all told. So it's pretty much to be expected to do pretty poorly for the first few attempts, unless you're really good at the genre already.

As for the disparity, IN just has a huge gap between the difficulty of easy mode and normal. Far wider than any other game in the series.