Perikles wrote:a mediocre player such as myself
You've gotta be trolling man, I consider you one of the absolute best players of retro-shmups on this forum, and our patron saint of the Gradius series.
You have so much experience with it that it's no surprise you can easily deal with the checkpoints. I myself can recover for the most part in it, even on the Moai stage. But not before I had practiced the game a bit; it's definitely not "easy". It requires practice to be able to do it, and the format for Death Roulette makes practice impossible. For someone who has very little prior experience with Gradius, this is actually a pretty difficult challenge, especially the last push of stage 2.
The challenge of DR comes from the random factor of what games get played, not simply that you only get one shot at it. Prior experience makes a huge difference. See Super Cobra. I'm guessing that game isn't all that hard once you've learned it, but with no prior experience? Nope.