Define what you mean by hard and then I can say whether you're correct or not. Otherwise you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say I want programming to be "hard" but I did say I'd rather work with smarter people. That doesn't mean smarter programmers exclusively program in Haskell, Erlang, Clojure, Scheme, Racket, SmallTalk, etc. I find programming overall to be quite easy in any language once you're used to thinking with the abstractions the language offers. The hard part is communicating with other people.

Also, your "less anecdotally" is by definition pretty anecdotal.