At first glance, changing the difficulty in Brütal Legend doesn't do a lot. Enemies still take the same amount of hits, after all. But after taking a closer look you'll realize the game changes quite a lot. Multiple aids are removed from the Intro (a.k.a. Welcome to the Age of Metal), Avatars (ex. Lionwhyte) become a lot more involved during stage battles, and some strats have to change drastically between Gentle and Brütal to accommodate these changes during your runs.

For these reasons, a Gentle-run and a Brütal-run aren't fairly comparable, and thus shouldn't share a leaderboard. That said, I'd like to propose splitting the boards into sub-categories by Difficulty instead of simply noting it as extra information.

For example:

I do agree that splitting up the board isn't the best idea. Simply removing the difficulty modifier should improve things, and if anyone is actually interested enough in it we could also add a Brütal% category, misc or not, because I do feel that the differences warrant it.

Definite support from me.

Just noting Brütal% as a possible future addition if it interests people, not something for right now, just because I assume there are people that care that much about difficulty and the added bragging rights.

Am I allowed to play devils advocate, eventhough I have nothing to do with this game in particular? I'd be for adding some form of discerning factor for dificulty, either a modifier or different category. And here is my reason why: If runs on other difficulties are truly different from eachother it needs some way of telling them apart. What you have now is a leaderboard where for example 1st and 2nd place have very different runs but a close time. I'd imagine people would like to know why these 2 runs that are so close in time vary wildly in their gameplay.

While I agree with the sentiment, the crux of the Any% category is to do whatever's fastest. By default, Gentle difficulty is fastest unless there is some gameplay change like, for example, the Tourbus drives a lot faster on higher difficulties (pretty sure this isn't the case, again, just an example). Difficulty might be an interesting side-note if it alters the run itself, but featuring the difficulty setting front-and-center just asks for people to scrutinize anything this isn't Brütal.

You said yourself that it requires a different approach and the runs aren't comparable, so this 'gameplay change' you mention is present. I agree that any% is supposed to be whatever is fastest, but so far Brutal has the WR and multiple 'competitive' times on the leaderboard are on Brutal. It feels really weird to me to not mention this fact to viewers and potential new runners. With so few runs there's barely any reason to remove the modifier.

I currently don't see any strong upside to having difficulty featured prominently on the boards, while I do see a strong downside. Difficulty is currently only good for additional bragging-rights. While difficulty is important to note when new / learning runners want to study a posted run, that doesn't need to be featured on the board. The difficulty is made clear at the start of every video recording.

Then we've come to a difference in views. IMO it gives an instant clear idea when looking at the board if the difficulty is present. The idea that; 'It is important enough to note the difficulty, so the runs are probably different, while the times for both runs are compareable.' An idea that would require a multiple clicks and video viewing to otherwise discern.

I'll leave it at this. Whatever the case, I'm gonna look into potentially running this game xd

I studied SimpleUnit's Brütal gameplay while practicing on Gentle. Only recently did I notice the relevant differences. The only way an issue could arise here is if a runner was wanting to play on Brütal, but studied a Gentle run, which isn't all that logical when we look at what difficulty is fastest.

I definitely second Ryedawg's idea of adding the Difficulty as a note to the run-page itself. It's relevant information to individual runs, not for the overal board.