Not really hard as in difficult technically, but hard as in requiring certain resources to perform a successful one. Case in point; Rubicant's attack only achieved a spike in traffic - teh "massive" load was not apparent in any other way.
For that matter, considering Herbie's apparent level of knowledge, I'd describe a decent DDoS fairly hard for him, even in the technical sense.

Hardly. Qhimm is just busy as always, and only log I've seen is the one he asked my opinion on. ...and there was nothing out of the ordinary in it, quite the opposite, the traffic was light-ish.