That was an issue for myself as well, which is why I have been trying to be very careful in my modpack to balance reward with risk. I am doing all the config tweaks to make things balanced so others, like yourself, don't have to.
So far I have had a LOT of chatter about "Minecraft is fun again!", and "OH GOD I NEED ARMOR!", and my favorite, "What the hell? What just killed me?" I MAY have leaned a bit too much on the hard side, but at least it is a challenge for my users. Thankfully no one is whining, as I cannot STAND whining.
minecraft actually becomes fun when it's more towards the hard side, without the "hard" part modded minecraft becomes easy really fast.
to spice things up for myself I have infernal mobs installed. it's killed me quite often already, but it does make the game more challenging and fun
but my current modlist is very small, just because if I install too many mods I get a whole lot more configurations which I can't decide on xD
I do have to say I often keep configurations to standard, because I want to try to play the mod as how the mod developer thinks you should play it, they made it so they should know the best how you should play their mod xD