Is D&D too hard?

[Godskook]

No; but it can sure help inform the approach I take when trying to rectify the situation.

For example, if you are doing something that is logically good but feels bad, trying to "put a positive spin on things" might be more effective than reworking the thing entirely.

Sure.

--------------------

As for your initial question, it comes down to three things:

1.The zone of proximal development

2.What sort of experience your players want to have.

3.Are you more attached to your style of gaming or your group of players.

The first is a concept from psychology to describe how tough something is. For some players, an encounter that requires resource expenditure to survive is too tough. For others, if an encounter can't kill 3 players in the opening round, there's no point even pulling out the combat map. Understanding your players and where they're at, developmentally as players, will let you tailor encounters to them, rather than some arbitrary standard. My PCs can't handle solo-threat invisible monsters typically. They don't have the preparations or tactics to deal with them before PCs die. So at my table, I treat invisibility as a bump to CR if the monster is a respectable melee threat without it.(Hellcats, for instance).

For the second, some players don't want to rollplay(not a spelling error) at all, and just freeform roleplay. Others want to "play" as if they're using cheat-codes. Not every player wants to experience D&D as it was (roughly)designed: a weaving of storytelling, tactical combat and random tragedy. It will be eminently helpful to you to understand what sort of gaming experience your players -want-. Players who adamantly their characters to be essentially invincible outside major plot events will not enjoy 3.5 as it is suggested unless they are insanely good at this game, as most players will inevitably die a few times in cheap situations.

Finally, on understanding how skilled your players are(as a group), and what sort of gaming experience they're after, you need to decide where your compromises are going. Are you ok DMing an easy-mode game cause that's where your players are at? Are you ok DMing one cause that's what they -want-? Cause while D&D is "supposed" to be hard, those are just guidelines, and you can trivially tailor the difficulty of the game to where-ever you want. For me, I lean towards preferring to have a group and make the game easier because that's where my players are at, but not making the game easier because that's the sort of game they want. I try to keep the game hard enough that players can legitimately just -die- from time to time, and they do.