I think the answer is probably both? The hack is definitely hard, but sections are purposely short -- about 30-45 seconds, according to the description on SMW Central. I'm halfway through and I'd say it's probably a little below Invictus in terms of difficulty, if only because of the short sections. They do share the same kind of tightness in their setups. In my amateur estimation, in terms of design El Dorado leans more on the side of extra button inputs/item juggling where Invictus generally keeps a more limited set of obstacles for any given section to force a specific sort of vocabulary based on what that level's theme is. It's pretty interesting to compare the two! I hope Juz plays this one, I'd love to hear his thoughts about it.Took me a solid half-hour to get the back half of Slime Time figured out, I think I'm a bit less good at item juggling than you guys are. I dipped into the next level for a bit, with the poison mushrooms, and so far I like it a lot. It's pretty similar to Plumber's Nightmare, but I like the way BeefStew reuses the poison shrooms so that you have to avoid each of them 2-3 times. I've got to admit, I'm having a hard time figuring out how difficult this hack is. In the moment-to-moment, it always seems pretty demanding, but levels aren't taking as long as they did for Invictus. Are the sections shorter, or have I just gotten better? Not sure, but there have been plenty of tricks so far that I was impressed I could pull off at all.
Also poison mushrooms are the wooooooorst
I kinda feel like the hacks that've come out in the past few months have made a perfect difficulty ramp between Akogare and Invictus. If you asked me now what sequence I'd recommend to someone who's already played the easier hacks, I'd probably say Akogare -> Hyperion -> Hark 2 -> Akogare 2 -> El Dorado -> Invictus. At least for me personally, I think I would've felt ready for Invictus if I'd worked through those first.