When I played Novice real hard for scoring, it seriously helped me a lot for the real Arcade game after. It's a good training to get used to enemies placement and having a good timing to optimize your breaks and score, even thou pattern are lot easier and slower.
But if you keep dying even once on Novice, Arcade won't let you live very long
If your main goal was to reach the top 10, then maybe time to try something harder.
My main goal was to reach top 3 in Novice, then top 3 in Arcade. I think I made it if i'm not mistaking
But I'm not done yet with Boost, still playing at the moment to beat my own and get the western record all ship together (I think Erppo is having it on Boost with Type I)