I actually didn't find this to be the case. All of my games have been on advanced since I've first cracked the box. All of my friends who i played with were novices as well and we always played on Advanced. The game scales very well with any understanding of game theory, no needing to stack the deck at all 
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying that the basic versions are equally as easy as advanced? If you only ever play advanced, you have no measure of how much more difficult advanced is than easy. Do you and your friends see the observed 2/3 win rate on advanced? Did you when you first cracked the box? (For the record, I was joking that using strong heroes is cheating.)
Out of curiosity, since the survey says Side A only and Side B only. I am wondering which Villans do people only play half of the Advanced rules most on?
Finally got my first Advanced game last night. Would say choosing Spite, with Nightmist, Omnitron, Eternal Haka and AZ. Was not the best choice to experience Advance for the first time. That extra 1 reduce was harsh with no damage buff and luck got worse when his first card was bounce 2 ongoing/equipment. Eventually won when we got Omnitron self-sustained to not taking more than 2 damage a turn and able to heal himself 2 HP.
very few games have only one side advanced - but if you look on the individual villain page at the top of each villain has their plays on advanced side a and advanced side b only.
I like tracking the incapacitated wins but I feel like they might not really say what we think. For example it looks like Haka has a terrible incapacitated side, because when he goes down the team looses the vast majority of the time. However, Haka has damage reduction and healing so he can live through a lot, its quite possible that he is the last one to be incapcitated in many of his games. Maybe its not that his incapacitated side is weak, so much as he doesn't get incapacitated easily so If he does get incapacitated the whole team is in a ton of trouble.
Voss and the Ennead are the ones that I play advanced and basic on different sides.
For Voss I like to play his side A on basic and side B on advanced. It makes it more important to decide when to let him flip.
For the Ennead, basic on side A means you will rarely see a flip. But the difference between basic and advanced is so much that I will sometimes play side A on advanced and side B on normal.
I noticed that when I played the Ennead for the first time yesterday, I played the first three and then never saw another one of them. The environment ended up finishing the fight because I was delaying to see if I could get any of the other villains to come out and fight me. However, Set was murdering me fairly quickly in the mid-game (hitting every hero multiple times with the elements card which does 1,1,1 and then his power which did 1,1… Ra took 10 damage in that one attack, made him deadly for my team and then when flipped you basically get an uncontrolled round before the villain turn), and I can imagine getting a lot of these guys out on the field at the same time gets incredibly difficult very quickly
only 5 games not advanced has the ennead flipped. Out of i think its 78. That is a stat I track :P
It /is/ possible for the Ennead to flip on not advanced (there are cards that play another obviously) but its just a rare occurance.
Especially on a 3 player game, as the deck would have to be completely reshuffled for that to occur. Since only playing the four copies would result in 7 in play. Unless Atum is incapacitated, then that could make it happen if somone is very unlucky at shuffling. In a five player game I could see it happening, especially if it takes play in Rook City.
I’m saying advanced isn’t that hard, with very few exceptions. We have about a 75% win percentage. Keep in mind that the advanced rules are known quantities, not mystery variables. If you know the big bad has damage resistance, you change your plays to account for that (or in a worse case scenario have the game run a little longer)
Now that being said, it could be that our play group is really good at finding synergy, and our experience isn’t the norm…but I kind of doubt it. The game has a very elegant and simple design. In a lot of ways it’s more of a puzzle/strategy game than it is about dumb luck. And as a result of that normal/ advanced is less of a factor than understanding game theory.