Do not confuse challenge with difficulty. I should be rewarded for doing things on multiple levels. Don’t make it cheep.
PvE does have a lot of things in it that can kill you on one hit. Many of them don’t have a well projected sign that tells you when they are going to do it. Many fights are just punishing if you don’t have the right professions in your group. They don’t let you learn from your mistakes they just face roll you until you decide to switch to a profession that works in that fight. Then the fight becomes extremely easy. Or its just the opposite and fights take no skill what so ever and you could be full glass cannon and stand in the same spot and destroy an enemy without even trying.
I know Arena Net knows how to make challenging content because the molten facility was some of the most challenging content in the game. Note thakittens challenging, not punishingly hard. This dungeon makes you use a skill in a way that you previously ignored during combat. It taught you how to fight the boss before you even got to it and scaled the enemies and rooms brilliantly to prepare you for the fight. We need more content like this.
The Next month you brought the dungeon on south sun. Which wasn’t even a real dungeon just 2 bosses. One you fight on your own. And another that is punishingly difficult unless you know exactly how to abuse its AI. Then it because unsatisfying and easy.
Arena needs to make content that better tests the players memory and skill while in PvE in order to make the experience more rewarding. Team co-operation should be especially important and should be focused on. I know Arena Net is capable of doing this because they showed all of us that they could do it. So now I expect each and every person to hold them up to this, and demand that they produce the best possible content.
That said, Players should be rewarded for playing a condition spec as much as they are playing a zerker spec. Players should be rewarded for using control or support more then just throwing up a reflection wall. It would also be nice to see enemies actually act with at least some level of intelligence. You don’t need to make them hit harder, have more health and more aoe circles to make them harder. You can give them more calculated behaviors rather then memorizing their often far too simple patterns. Enemies actually using blocking or dodging wisely would be a massive plus while fighting them and would make it so zerker warriors would have to rely more on someone who can control or support them to actually get the effectiveness they desire rather then just them face rolling everything in there path.
For a better explanation then I can provide. http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/when-difficult-is-fun