Sorry, but this reads as: You can not enjoy permadeath if it’s your own choice to play the game that way. Rather, other people must tell you it is the “good”/“right” way to play the game that way.
I don’t even have anything to say to that. Someone might as well tell me “Ants shouldn’t be in the game because the flying Spaghetthi monster really hates ants”.[/quote]I am, throughout that post, describing my own view, so the various “you’s” are mostly “me’s” but meant to be more readable, and to invoke a sense of empathy with the speaker. 
Regardless, that is not what I meant by that saying. Not that you cannot enjoy it, but that that enjoyment itself comes with a conditional - you must be winning.
If you play a roguelike and you keep dying, you are going to want permadeath off just so you can “effin play the game”, in the hypothetical player’s frustrated words. If you get good at playing enough that you have fun and start progressing, you will not mind permadeath - up until the point where a later difficulty spike starts killing off your much more advanced and involved characters with regularity. But one way or another, the game does not provide an option to play it in another way - so like it or not, you are playing the game. Or not, as it were. Or you cheat - but then that’s always an option, be it a debug menu or simple savescumming - but it’s out of your immediate reach when playing, so you learn to get better gradually, trying and failing to survive until you try and succeed.
Now then if the game were to come with options - like, oh, I don’t know, Starbound - you literally don’t have much of a choice if you’re starting out. If you play Ironman, unprepared, you will die to the first random tough monster and that’ll be it. And then you will have to start again, possibly spending another hour or so getting your tools and materials dug up and crafted again, only to die once again at some other random happening like a pool of magma. You literally have no choice but to play one of the two easier difficulties when you’re starting out, otherwise you will be “enjoying” hours of repeating grind every time you start a new character - that game is not designed with permadeath in mind. It’s not a game where a character is anywhere reasonably competent at the outset, and it has a mandatory period of boring digging around at the initial phase of every new character - that’s in addition to your initial choice of planet being random, meaning you could randomly start on an poison-water world with meteor rains. It’s literally a game where you are expected to repeatedly die as you play. You do not play Starbound on Ironman in order to enjoy the experience of dying again and again - and starting over again and again - you play it once you’ve gotten good enough at it that you can succeed, in the face of it not being meant to be played that way. You will only enjoy a tacked-on Ironman mode when you succeed at playing it. Unless you enjoy a boring grind, of course.
Cataclysm on the other hand, as well as other games like it, is built around the idea that death is always permanent. This is why it has no “start-up” period, for one - you are expected to be capable of surviving the start of the game, at least by running away in the correct direction. It’s less “being told that it’s the right way to play”, and more it actually being the right - and only - way to play. When the game’s entire design is based on the premise that the player can survive from the start - is expected to survive, even - it means that even an inexperienced player, starting out, can achieve a sense of accomplishment by repeatedly going out and trying again and again, without any boredom from the start.
As to why it applies to me? I am not yet an experienced Cataclysm player. I am not at the point where my character is driving around in an impregnable battlefortress, his collection of power-armor suits clanking merrily in their display racks in the back, right next to the entire armory of weapons, food stockpile, and medical facility. I am still prone to lose my starting characters to stupid mistakes, and I covet the characters that do succeed. I have still not discovered everything this game has to offer - I do not want to be put in a position where I am tempted to discover them all without any risk and sense of discovery that playing the game as it was originally meant to be played would provide. Because when I no longer have anything to find within the game, I will lose that bit of entertainment that I get from it. And I don’t want to reach that point any sooner than I have to.
