Personally, I'm not a big fan on the idea of reducing the number of dates/bedroom activity to increase difficulty route. Since this is still an adult game... and the game is now shot its own kneecaps off by reducing the adult interaction... what? That's part of the reason why I played V6 update once... and haven't bothered with it till now.
Maybe reduce the actual obidience/loyalty, or increase max loyalty cap to make it harder to get max loyalty. And speaking of difficulties... any difficulty is borked if you have even the most basic idea on how to modify a save file. With the format of Conquest, you can edit the save file with any document editing software (although they are all murder on your eyes) and basically modify anything you please unless it's hardcoded into the game (like the cap for your main attribute).