Most people also vastly prefer not having to work on difficult problems. Iverson was clearly trying to provide a notation that would help the (admittedly smaller) group of people who find solving difficult problems interesting and valuable.
John once did a live demo where a negative number (like ¯17.01) suddenly appeared in his APL session log. He looked puzzled for a moment, continued with his demo script for a little while, and arrived at the statement ⎕DL ¯17 (delay negative 17 seconds, and return the actual amount of time waited). He exclaimed "Oh, THAT's what that was!" and continued with his demo.
John had a fantastic sense of humour, if you have not seen them I recommend taking a little time off to watch some of the recordings at https://johnscholes.rip/video/