I don't think anyone is autistic, I legit think some people just don't understand the game well enough to realize how progression happens. I mean many of them are extremely low ranked, below me in many cases. They seem to have it in their mind that a new or intermediate player will just play at a certain star diff and then magically be able to make the jump to the next one if they do that long enough. Spreads with gradual changes in difficulty starting at a higher point if necessary facilitate this and play out much better in a real world scenario.
For example,
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/212120&m=0 helped me progress a lot when i was newer, the difference between Insane and Y is not much star wise, but it definitely felt like a world of difference. Difficulties being incremental will be awful maps for everyone minus those who just play the highest one anyway.
We need people who are more in touch with the gameplay itself making decisions that affect things like player progression.
It's worked in the past, just look at Tom94, the ranking system resulted largely from his skill as a player telling him how difficult things are relative to eachother and where they balance out that resulted in a remarkably accurate ranking system, especially compared to what we had.
Another example aside from this proposed spread changes that stems from poor understanding of how the game plays, would be the changes to volume sliders, going from the non invasive one on the right to the c0000l spe3d0met3rz in the middle of the screen. Those were designed by some guy who legit had like 19 ranked plays, if memory serves. What.
I understand Peppy though, he generally stays away from gameplay, and if he would ever consider something that changes how people play or progress it would undergo rigorous testing and feedback first, because he understands that many of the players are far more invested and possess far more understanding of gameplay than he does. It's humility and respect for the people he is offering this product to. Something that I think some other staff members could benefit from.
Would be cool to see Peppy play more(tm) but inbetween his distaste for the shitstorm maps that have been getting pumped out for the past 4 years or so, and working+coding all the time, I have no high hopes for it.. So we just have to hope he listens to his community over his staff, because he's the last hope for all of us.
tl;dr we need more people who are well educated+skilled at the game+care about the community in charge. A rare combo for sure, there's not too many tom94's out there.