I wholeheartedly agree with all your points, Chris. But the things you appreciated as a developer, I couldn't really appreciate as much as a player.
I played Classic Iron Man too, but found it too "hard" for me. Not hard because I couldn't figure out good strategies. But because the game took my strategies and threw them back at me every time. No matter what I did, everything seemed random in the most wrongful ways. The game just kept punching me below the belt, it never felt fair. The original X-Com games never felt CHEAP like this. The aliens could feel cheap, some luck-based things sometimes happened that could also feel cheap. But the actual game always felt balanced, even on higher difficulties (Veteran was my place to be though). I ended up going down to EASY for the new XCom, just to see it through. I had grown tired of it. There was NO sense of strategy, no smart tactical decisions. Any decision could screw up your whole mission.
But when you met a group of aliens and had them flanked, you'd be set to win, right? Nope. Because with "higher difficulty", the developer really meant "less fair". The only difference with the lower and higher difficulty settings, is that enemies take a ridiculous amount of damage, your men can die instantly when hit, the aliens ALWAYS hit you, and you NEVER hit them. EVER. It's not "classic" just because you use the word "classic". It's just cheap and unfair. And me being a die-hard fan of the old X-Com games, stating that something is UNFAIR to the point of it barely being playable, should say a lot - because UFO Defense and Terror could be bloody unfair at times too.
So I ended up just playing on Easy. Even then the game took cheap shots at me, but at least now my men could get hit like 3-4 times before dying. I just wanted to see it through, see what the next research would lead to and where the story went. The combat-gameplay basically became the least interesting and entertaining part of the game for me, and I ended up focusing more on the other factors for entertainment. And for a game that's 90% about the combat-gameplay, that's not exactly a very flattering "compliment"....