I'd have to disagree, coming from a student who actually had to deal with the HSC this year, it has definitely been harder than in the past. I prepared for math, going through countless past papers/questions especially of high difficulty and I haven't seen questions of this nature. They never have focused on stats/normal distribution so much. A lot of these questions also required very refined skills that completely differ from (my own experience at least) what we have been taught.
Everyone raved about the difficulty of last year, I personally believe this was far more difficult (excluding those few easy marks questions). This is also the general consensus I've heard from multiple schools.
Just having more statistics questions does not automatically make a paper "hard/difficult".
I consider the added stats a primary reason in why I found the paper unfriendly. I believe this year's cohort have every right to be
angry downright p***ed about the paper. But at the end of the day, that just means the paper has been loaded with more relatively foreign material. It makes preparing for this paper significantly less straightforward, and yes there would be fewer resources to facilitate this. Incredibly "stressful" is another word I'd consider appropriate.
But I reserve the word "hard/difficult" for the actual difficulty of the questions themselves. Several of the questions themselves do not require heavily abstract thinking. For the most part, the questions just demanded knowledge of various concepts in the statistics topic. (Obviously not all - there were a few major curveballs. But there were several "conceptually doable" questions.)
I also do not believe that "very refined skills" are needed to do the paper. I respect that many teachers and students don't yet have the skills to do this much statistics (again, no denying the paper was "unfriendly", or another word stronger than that). But the actual skills themselves were, for the most part, not outrageous.
If anything, I would be more willing to call the paper "evil", than to call it "hard/difficult".