Getting 3 "achievements" or "trophies" just for playing through the tutorial (or, in Mass Effect 2's case, sitting through the tedious opening sequence introducing the cheesy and badly written travesty EA seems to regard as a "plot") is a bit off-putting. Maybe targeting 13 year old suburban ADD patients requires constant cheap attention grabbing to prevent these people from playing one of their 47 other games if there is a tiny obstacle.
Just so you know, those achievements are like tracking cookies: the video game companies can't just send home whatever data they want, but they can see achievement data. So that achievement was just to see how many of the people who bought the game actually started to play, to provide a baseline for how many (go halfway/beat the game/play the multiplayer/anything else they can jam in an achievement).
While I don't agree with your prejudices, I do believe you're on spot here by saying that choice is one of the major factors in games becoming ever friendlier.
Not only are there considerably more games today, being pushed out with considerably more marketing. We're living in the age of free to play, where the next free game is just a download away. To make any kind of money in F2P, the developers need to keep players playing, so that they'll eventually pay. Basically the same goes for selling DLC.
So I'd say the lack of difficulty is mostly caused by how games are monetised these days.
