I asked: "make more Medium tracks". What should have been asked: "make more fair tracks".

So after my foray into some custom tracks I tried a few more, from a variety of authors, both Medium and Hard. And I must say, some people have very different categories of what constitutes "medium" in this game.

For instance, "Lone Digger" lost the Hard track and became Medium. It didn't change a lick in the track itself (at least, haven't noticed from my playthrough) - it's just Medium instead of Hard. Which, considering the pace, the frequent use of traps and the tricky off-beat patterns with shields, it is not. Most Medium tracks in vanilla feature a smattering of special mechanics, towards higher intensities.

Difficulty comes with expectations. For me "Medium" means "if you finished the campaign on Medium, with few losses, and only reloaded to get a certain track/mini game on an A/S, you should be fine". Which, ironically, is what I get from some Hard levels more than what I get from some Mediums.

One example of the latter would be Merchant's Lament (from FTL: Multiverse soundtrack). The guy tried putting most melodic parts on Medium on the board, and with how many and how swift those are, you get quickly overwhelmed and thrown out. And considering how I felt initially playing Lone Digger (on Hard back then), it would now present the same issue: quick to strike, slow to feed, hard for mainly Medium player to get into the proper groove.

While examples of the former would, surprisingly be, Attack of the Killer Queen and Too Big To Fail. They also have a lot of things that feel quite hard (first has interesting combinations with shields and tricky formations, while the second has segments of hordes that are pressed in rapid succession, and visuals are lost). But since they are on Hard difficulty, it feels more appropriate: you asked for Hard, you got Hard. And even then, the melody is fairly followed to allow one to intuit tricky motions, food is present early on (so you can learn from initial encounters) and scarce later (so that you prove you can do it).

Rambling stopped. Overall, the idea is simple: compared your Mediums to vanilla Mediums, at least in general. Some advanced manoeuvres are too tricky for middling players and maybe should be few in numbers for a Medium track. Please consider that when making levels.