"Players need to earn difficulty" vs map mods

Storytime:
The second someone hits maps, they encounter map mods, which vary wildly. A new player is not gonna know that he can even reroll maps.
As he finds out that he can reroll maps, he's going to be doing rare maps. Massive jump in difficulty, practically making his t7s into t12s.
Eventually, he's gonna play a rare map that he doesn't wanna chaos, and get punished for it. Playing anything you're not ready for feels kinda shit.

He really didn't earn any of this difficulty. It's just random crap that happened. He might even have a possessed rare monster in one of those rare maps, completely skewing the difficulty curve.

GGG's core learnings:
How does all this random difficulty pair with this core GGG mentality of earning difficulty? To me it just seems like one giant mess of contradictions.

Bottom line, base maps shouldn't be able to be hard (relatively) without significant investment. Throwing an alch onto a white map is not that.

PoE2:
This mentality ought to form the core of PoE2's mapping system, and aligns with the new currency usage.
This also trivializes the sustain equation problems, as you just won't get very many returns (plateauing around t11 equivalent) if you aren't running costly rare maps.


Absolutely putting these concepts in my own game :)