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I get frustrated with games that scale things with me. I want to be able to feel myself getting better, having my enemies scale with me on any axis really takes away from that feeling that I'm progressing.

I say this not because I think it's an especially noteworthy or important objection, but to echo GP's point, that it's very hard to find AI that suits everyone, and it's not just a matter of difficulty.

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Exactly. I do want AI to scale with me, but by me selecting better AI when I get better. That's how I measure my progress: by having to select better AI. That makes my progress transparent.

And by having different AI at different difficulty levels, I think you actually can have AI that suits everyone. But I don't think most game companies like developing several separate versions of AI. They just want one that's superficially "good enough".

I recall seeing Sid Meier say in a talk that he liked to scale his AI to give players the sense of being on a knife's edge and then scaling it back near the end of a game to give a feeling of victory over impossible odds.

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