I enjoyed this. It brought back memories of bringing up BSD2.9 on the PDP 11/55t we had in the lab. That particular PDP 11 was pretty rare (it had some memory split features to improve performance for computational tasks) and poking around in the kernel to get to the point where init was started. Nothing quite like that thrill, a mixture of power, and 'oh crap this is going to be a lot of work'.
I'm not going to argue on 'harder' or 'not as hard' as such things are often personal measures that are difficult to quantify. I will however point out the meta fallacy of even thinking about these things in terms of 'not hard.'
The truth is, computers have become exceptionally complex. That is one of the reasons I've been building a medium complexity standalone system (ARM Cortex M based) to give folks something that is somewhere between 8 bit Arduino type experiences and 64 bit IA-64 or even ARM Cortex A9 level complexity. I realized when I started finding ways to teach my kids about computation that I was very lucky to have things like PDP-11's, VAXen, 68000's, and DEC-10s to play with which did not present this huge wall of complexity that needed to be scaled to get to the fundamentals. My target is a self hosted 'DOS' style Monitor/OS for the Cortex M4 series. Complex enough to host its own development environment and tools, but simple enough that you can keep it all in your head at the same time.
I was actually just pointing out the irony that 30 years of processor innovation have lead to making the task of booting even more complicated than it used to be ;)
(Note: I understand why, that doesn't make it less ironic.)
