Ima throw this thought i have into the room in order to see what the rest of the community thinks of it.

After the "Spawn" update you are now (more or less) able to choose the difficulty you wanna play on. This will make sure that (hopefully) only people that feel ready for nightmare, will encounter it, decreasing the difficulty of nightmare significantly.
In addition, the easiest difficulty now features respawns. Making sure that the amount of players in one round stays high even with a high deathcount.

A big problem i have with the game are these 8 player lobbies. Working together with 4 random people can be a hassle sometimes. So you can imagine how hard it is with 7.
The devs propably stayed with the huge playercount from the original in order to make sure harder difficulties dont become impossible to complete. Basicly spawning more people with the thought that some will die along the way.
Many people dont realize that a full lobby of 8 players is both harder and more tideos to complete then when the lobby is only half full. Due to itemdilution.
This can be felt the most at the beginning of Pottsvile, where there is never enough ammo around in order to sustain 8 responders. Meaning two or three are always doomed to either die or waddle behind everyone, doing nothing until they find something in the communitycenter or even further into the round.

But now, that people entering nightmare actualy come either already prepared to fight or have the skill to scavange something together before they die and with frequent respawns on the easiest difficulty, i dont think we need 8 players in one lobby to buffer for a high bodycount anymore.

If it where up to me i would cut the lobbysize in half. From 8 down to 4. But since there are already so many coop games with 4 player coop and NMRIH2 desperatly needs something to differentiate itself from other coop titles, i think 5 players would also be acceptable.

With this change the devs could finaly start implementing some changes to increase playercooperation while automaticly making sure that the game both stays chalanging yet beatable and making sure that there will always be enough ammunition to go around, even on hard or nightmare where lootspawns are decreased.