What are you playing?

I realized that I had a saved game a couple of levels before the end of DBP53: Plutonian Sunrise. Might as well finish it.

Mayhem mansion

Cold as Hell SE. It seems that there is some kind of bug in whichever GzDoom version Delta Touch uses that prevents bandages from working properly. Not a game breaking issue but still annoying. The mod is pretty good. I enjoyed the mix of survival horror and braindead slaughter

Arctic Wolf oh yeah! He got me hooked.

I'm trying to play alphatius (Qzan), but there's no one alive to play with. There's no one alive on the European server, and the American and Australian servers have unacceptable ping.

JankFood 4 came out. hobbling through that... When you get to Map10 things start getting tough and you gotta start skipping maps or git gud.
I haven't played a lot of the other Halloween stuff tho, maybe I should give those a try. Wormwood's, Alcazar, Ad Mortum, etc.

Getting mad at some classic stuff lately. Played to the middle of both Memento Mori 2 and Requiem, and i can no longer endure them. They have some amazing ideas that you don't often see even to this day, and i appreciate being able to play something from the community that doesn't eventually turn into cliché Sunlust copycat slaughter in giant flat green halls, like Necromantic Thirst. Unfortunately, the way MM2 and Requiem treat the player is insulting at times. Way too many maps in MM2 have nonsensical progression, and there's no armor anywhere outside of secrets, when you have to deal with hordes of hitscanners with awkward placement. Was that their answer to difficulty back then?

Requiem also suffers from some of these tropes, with the addition of Ikka Keranen's maps, which are ahead of their time visually (seriously, most maps in Requiem look better than Alien Vendetta), and i can't even tell how he pulls these double stacked fake bridges, not even by looking in the editor. That being said, all of his maps suffer from some of the most annoying level design ever. Let me tell you what this guy loves to do - 64 unit wide corridors with Barons in them, and not once or twice, but all the time... oh, and with no rockets, just SSG. He gives the word cramped a new meaning with his maps. His other favorite trope is mancubi in 128x128 rooms with one way lifts adjacent to them that drop you right in front of their line of fire, with no way to run or hide.

At some point, both megawads become very annoying to play. There's barely enough ammo to get you going, even if you're playing continuous, you'll find yourself with no shells way too often. In Map14 i finished with 0 of everything... on continuous play! How are you supposed to finish this from pistol start blind, when even the berserk is a secret in this map?
For the rest, you have the rocket launcher and the plasma gun with barely any ammo for both, and you do nothing but shotggunning in the mid-game maps, and did i mention they hate giving you any armor? Tedious, unfair, repetitive and boring. I thought of trying Memento Mori 1 as well, but i'm no longer sure if i want to.

I play on UV because usually that's the intended difficulty by most mappers, so going down to HMP or lower, always hides a risk of getting a less balanced experience. In the case of MM2 and Requiem, going to HMP might be a good idea, but that still won't solve some of the other problems such as the frustrating design choices, the confusing progression in a lot of the MM2 maps and the lack of armor. Even if the difficulty is easier, not having that extra lair of protection against hitscanners will always be frustrating for me, because all it takes is a few bad damage rolls.

I think you're chasing some nebulous idea of "balance" that doesn't really exist in practice. Old wads don't follow a special design pattern like modern ones. I talked about that briefly in the text file for Undeath '94, because it's one of the things that I actually enjoy.
And I stopped bothering to make levels after that because Freedoom rejected one of my maps for being too easy.

moreover, there's such an enormous abundance of wads to play, that even the best wads are not worth your time to play more than once. That's not a neg on the quality of Doom wads out there. It's just the sheer quantity of content I haven't experienced yet makes it kinda paralyzing to replay stuff I've played before unless i can't actually remember it.

As a designer, knowing that I'm continually adding to this pool of Doom wads, it doesn't really make any sense to design a map beyond one particular skill level. It's kinda pretentious to expect people to practice on my maps so they can replay it later on a harder skill and eventually master it.