I'm ashamed to admit but I was never THAT GOOD at many games, especially for the NES. (Bear with me here, I've had memory issues for anything happening before I was 16 so, while I believe this is quite accurate, may be revised after asking my Mom about it later )
Story-time again: Birthday, 1991. I got TMNT for the NES and, like most kids of that time, was just really excited to play with those shelled-heroes on my tv. Now, if you haven't played it, this game is not only quite different from the TV show, but INSANELY FRIGGIN' HARD FOR A 6 YEAR OLD. After breaking two, yes two, controllers for the system, Mommy thought it was time to get another game. While at Toys R' Us, I was distracted by this new shiny box that had a pixelated GAME GENIE logo on it. The "master your games" tagline was enough to sell me. Cue typical child pestering at toy store to get such-and-such toy. And thus began a life-long habbit of relying on the easy way out if games were too hard (exclude any two-player games, I wasn't that much of a douche).
So yes, way back when games were meant to be harder. I guess you could say the harder the game meant the longer you played it, and the longer you played it the better value it seemed to have to your parents/the game creator/the retail that sold it to you. I'm probably way off there, but the point is it's what people were used to. Nowadays, many more games focus on multiplayer, and the difficulty factor is lower due to either a lower attention span in general or any other number of factors one could claim. I would just take it as gaming's progress.
Example: Contra was a ridiculously hard game, despite a cheat code that made it much more beatable, was still a blast. Look at something like Vampire Rain now, with a large difficulty factor attributed to buggy design and terrible production decisions.
I know there were a number of topics I brought up that are debatable, but that's just my opinion on things.