I'm not gonna Sigismund myself but I like to play max difficulty. I've got black capes for Vanguard and Heavy, and I typically queue for Absolute when I just want to relax. I enjoy high intensity, fast-paced gameplay.
Trying to get a decent crucible match in and of itself is the actual torture. It's not the difficulty.
I will pick my penances, typically avoiding instant death, friendly fire, all those really dumb ones. I'll hit random mission because I don't mind playing any map.
More often than not I am queued into a post-fail lobby where the host either immediately goes AFK indefinitely in the armory or just quits the game. On the small chance they are still there, it will take a third person a solid 3-5 minutes to actually connect to the game. They will always be Penance T1.
For a solid 75% of my games, my teammates, who through nearly no fault of their own other than being low penance level, get absolutely throttled by forced team penances such as boosted Majoris numbers or spore mine spawns and will blow up and die immediately early into the mission.
If I am lucky one or both of them do not leave on the spot. There are zero backfills in Crucible. I am now permanently handicapped for the rest of the mission. I am being actively punished for something somebody else did that I have no control over.
Because if I want anything resembling decent XP I have to take massive damage handicap modifiers, I do not have the DPS to just solo the whole game. I am not that guy.
Half of the time my teammates have wildly overestimated themselves and taken instant death on downed. Maybe they are good, but Space Marine 2 is still blatantly not fair two years after release and you can be stunlocked or instant killed through no fault of your own. I just had a Crucible fail because while trying to rescue my two downed teammates, a Zoanthrope beam with it's unfixed hitbox slammed me into a wall. Through logic only Saber will ever know, being shoved against a wall forces you into an unskippable, uncancellable animation. I was hit by a second beam. I have 3% HP from 100%. I die. We lose.
And then of course in a gamemode where you already had no control over your teammates skill level, you now also have no control over what penances they take. Probably the most universal experience I had at low penance level was a mid-tier joining, immediately dying, and then leaving the game on the spot. Me and my poor random partner are now shackled with whatever ungodly penance combination they chose. I once got left in a Decapitation lobby with a T1 random that had extra Terminus spawns because a T6 had joined us, got beaten to death by Lictors before they even left the first room, ragequit, and basically doomed us to guaranteed defeat when we got slammed with a double Carnifex spawn at the very first possible Terminus spawn point.
More often than not Crucible feels like it's decided before I've even entered the mission. Once you hit T4+ penances, just seeing a T1/T2 join makes me consider quitting on the spot knowing they will likely just fall over dead after a single boosted wave. I've yet to be proven wrong on this, and man I have tried.
The fact that you lose XP no matter what even if you leave or lose the game actively encourages both other players and myself to quit early. If I see a mission has blatantly failed, and there's no chance of saving it, I'm not going to put myself through three loading screens to return to the mission queue. I'm just going to leave and let the other two people in the lobby suffer for it. And if I'm not the one to make that choice to leave, somebody else will. And for every person that leaves, you just ensure the mission fails for everyone you left behind. The anti-incentive of guaranteed XP loss encourages people to actively abandon their brothers and be every man for themselves instead of sticking together as a team.
I've got 600 hours in this game and used to play it for weeks on end. Nowdays I will boot it up, attempt Crucible, watch everyone die and ragequit within 15 minutes, lose XP, and just exit the game to go play something I have control over. I don't like this.