Except not. It may be called Hard, but that doesn't give it an excuse for sloppy stat scaling. Take Radiant Dawn for instance. The middle difficulty was Hard in Japanese, so it fits this example. I know there's English Hard/Japanese Maniac, but here we're doing Japanese for a point. Radiant Dawn's Hard is very doable, but takes good amounts of strategy, especially in Part 1. You cannot low man the game and expect to win. How about Eliwood Hard Mode? It doesn't even reach Awakening's level of difficulty.
For Awakening, Low manning is pretty much encouraged. If you play normally, it's likely that the too quickly promoted enemies combined with their massive caps, you'll likely fall behind. The game's Hard Mode is also the middle difficulty. I expect this from Lunatic. I expect to be able to use 15 or so units, which is around where the unit limit is for every chapter. I especially feel like forged weapons should have waited for Lunatic, and even then, it feels wrong seeing enemies with forges considering how PoR through New Mystery had them exclusive to you.