The goal of Collegeboard is to make the new SAT appear friendly to students. I think that goal has more or less been achieved. Because it is a standardized test, they will need the student population to fall in more or less a normal distribution. If a lot of students do really well on it, then they will have to tweak it to so there is a nice distribution. The key goal of Collegeboard was to eliminate this perception that SAT was a tricky test. So how do you create a test that seems easy to students but is able to differentiate them, that is the holy grail here.
We know ACT is a straight forward test and I haven’t seen any students complaining about the test, but ACT test also creates a normal distribution of student scores. The SAT is just morphing into an ACT to stay relevant.