Difficulty alone isn't enough. A puzzle can take longer because it asks for one satisfying deduction, or because it hides a routine step in a sea of candidates. Those feel very different.
When a puzzle becomes memorable, is it usually the technique it teaches, the moment the grid opens up, or something else? And what crosses the line from challenging into bookkeeping?
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A useful distinction might be time-to-solve versus the number of genuinely new decisions. Two 25-minute puzzles can ask very different things: one may hinge on a single inference, while the other repeats scanning. Difficulty labels rarely show that. It would be more useful if solvers could describe the bottleneck, not just the clock.