Adding a custom difficulty settings menu for operations would improve player experience, keep players engaged longer, and possibly relieve some pressure on devs to buff/nerf weapons and enemies. It could work like this: difficulty sliders would exist for parameters like enemy HP, enemy attack damage, enemy aggression (attack frequency), enemy spawn rates and spawn sizes, the probability of various enemy classes spawning, the number of ammo equipment drops, and I'm sure there are relevant parameters that can be included. For each parameter, players would choose a difficulty level from the existing levels (minimal through lethal). Each parameter would provide experience based upon the difficulty level chosen and some weight based upon that parameter's contribution to 'total difficulty'. For instance, if a player chose to set enemy attack damage to "substantial" and all other difficulty parameters to "average" then the experience payout upon victory would be between what is currently rewarded for substantial and average (closer to average, since most parameters were set to that level). 

For my own personal journey I would use these settings to keep enemy HP at minimal while increasing the difficulty of most or all other parameters. For me, bullet sponge enemies don't generally fit my tastes and especially in this 40k IP context, don't seem like accurate reflections of what many of the weapons in the game should be doing. HOWEVER, I know that others may like bullet sponges. With custom difficulty settings, we can all have our cake and eat it too, choosing our own power fantasy.

I second that.

For me I would like to be able to turn off my class perks for example. It is just a simple thing, but I already can see even with the little perks that I have how it reduces the difficulty.