Puzzle Rating

I feel like an idiot.

I play puzzles daily and at this point I've completed around 19,000 puzzles on chess.com.

For the past year I've been bouncing around 1600 rating and felt like I couldn't make any progress. I would solve several puzzles in a row quickly and only get 1-2 rating points for each puzzle and if I misclicked or didn't spot the optional tactic on the first go I would drop 20-30 rating points.

Today I found out that you can change difficulty in the settings and if you leave it at standard it caps puzzles around 1300 ELO.

Why is this the default setting?

Wouldn't you expect to do puzzles around your rating?

Anyway, I bumped it up to Hard and now I'm getting more interesting puzzles that are closer to my rating and I'm climbing fast. It feels like I've been training with ankle weights all year.

What is your experience with difficulty settings on puzzles?

Should I just set it at the hardest difficulty?