I was thinking of one possibility being that the vast majority of handicrafters being not nearly as good as the very best people in the field. So if you want a scale from 1-10 that covers the full range of difficulty, from "a beginner can do a 1" to "only the top 1% can do a 10", then the difficulty that the average crafter can manage would be around 3 or so, because there has to be a lot of room at the top for progressively more difficult patterns that are mostly out of the reach of the average. This would assume that handicrafters internalize the rating system: that instead of thinking "a 1 is easy for me and a 10 is difficult for me" they rate patterns based on how that pattern's difficulty compared to other patterns that they've done: "It was a bit harder than this other pattern that got a 2, so I'll put it at a 3".
I have no idea if this is the case or not, though -- I don't even know how to knit or crochet. :)
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I have no idea if this is the case or not, though -- I don't even know how to knit or crochet. :)