"One of the aspects of Heroquest 2 I am having a hard time accepting is the increase of the base difficulty every few sessions."
The root of your problem with this rule seems to be that you're conflating difficulty (which is one of very easy, easy, moderate, hard, very hard and nearly impossible and doesn't increase with time) with the base target number (which does increase with time).
The difficulty of winning a contest is determined by what's dramatic, not some simulation of physics. When someone decides their character is going to jump between buildings the thought process for the GM doesn't ask themselves how far it is, what the strength of the character is, they ask "Is failure interesting?" and "Would I believe it in a work of fiction based on this genre?" So if failing to make the jump removes the character from the rest of the adventure, sod it, he or she succeeds. If it just complicates their lives and they can get back into the thick of it by overcoming another obstacle, assign a difficulty.
If you want to remove this rule from your game you've got at least two options:
Whatever you do don't make the mistake (as I did for a while and the authors of the three Sartar Rising books) of keeping target numbers static and letting the characters develop. "This wall is this high so it means this resistance" or "Dark Troll mooks are this tough." It lead to a fairly sterile game until I started upping the target number by one every time the characters succeeded and dropping it by one every time they failed. So I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that if you don't use the rule deliberately you'll probably find you're using it informally unless you also freeze character development.
Cheers,
Ash
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