First two wins (both melee-oriented gateclosers) and opinions on the difficulty

[Al-Khwarizmi]

One of the moments I remember most fondly in my RPG playing history was at the beginning of Might and Magic VII (a great game all around). In the initial island, there is a cave with a dragon. Yes, an effing dragon when you are level 1 or so. And you get a quest in that cave. Of course, the idea is to do whatever you were supposed to do (I don't remember, probably grabbing an item or something) and get the hell out of there. But with a lot of hit and run tactics and careful timing (and many retries and probably some saving and restoring, I must confess) I actually managed to kill the bugger. Oh, the sense of achievement!

This kind of challenges just don't happen in games with heavy level scaling.

[JellySlayer]

6. Speed is overrated. Energy cost is a lot more effective and has no downsides at all. Speed, on the other hand, enjoys diminishing returns after about 120-125, which, combined with Long Stride, already allow one to outrun roughly 98% of enemies, including most of the dangerous ones. Bringing one's speed to 120-125 can be very easily achieved by guaranteed or semi-guaranteed means, too.

Speed affects all actions; energy cost generally only affects specific ones. Big difference. As noted, speed also affects dodging missiles and spells. Important for PCs without alertness.

The artifact bracers and cloak are so much better than any non-artifact counterpart it's not even funny. There should be more options for such items to dilute the item pool and provide different benefits to consider.

True, but these items are both very rare, random drops, and not even available in all games.

I'm pretty sure I would still be able to get tons of artifacts, farm mosses and morgia, bless my potions of gain attributes, and read scrolls of corruption removal as any RC; the early game would still be governed by RNG but it would only be a matter of time before I got good enough rolls to get through. So, which RC would you recommend me try? It could be an interesting experiment to probe the current state of the game's balance. I would even play it on the public server just to demonstrate my progress and whatnot. Somehow I'm absolutely sure it would be a lot easier than playing an overpowered RC 100% atheist from start to finish.

The first, maybe 1000-2000 turns are RNG governed. Any character who can survive that far is winnable, IMHO.

If you really want to make the game harder, try playing doomed from start to finish.