Maybe I gave up on the game too early. The difficulty was not ramping up fast enough for me. I might take your advice and reinstall it and continue where I left off.
I thought HRM had a very odd skill curve, started out very easy and then got difficult quickly. I think overall it's too hard for somebody who isn't a programmer, and there aren't enough hard problems for a programmer. And once the problems got hard, it seemed more like work and less like fun. And a lot of it seemed like busy work since there were so few instructions.
Excellent point...I think that is what was happening...I must have gotten to the "hard" zone as you describe, and simply got bored of work, but wasn't challenged (which is what I want from a game).
I've never been able to articulate why I gave up on this game when I did, and your comment finally put it into words. Spot on observation, thanks!