I've been thinking a lot about this ever since ToC launch where it was in your best interests to try to guess ahead of time how they might make a fight 'hard mode' (unless you can run a 'test' 25-man first to get information about the encounters.)
My husband is a game designer and told me the first thing you learn about game design is that it's all about limits. If you can do whatever you want, that's just play. But if what you do is limited and you have to work to overcome or circumvent those limitations--that's a challenge.
If you create a "game" where you ask two people to just take turns naming foods, it stops being fun or interesting quickly. But as soon as you add the limit of "your food must start with the last letter of the other person's food" you've created a challenge of limitation. And that one is a good limit because it also creates player interaction: if you can come up with a food with a nasty final letter, you make the other player's job harder.
Looking from that perspective I came up with a some examples that force you to play differently on hardmodes by applying limits. Examples are after the cut:
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