>>9771524
I was just about to respond pretty much the way >>9771523 just did. I haven't played both versions back to back - in fact I've never played any versions of the game except the original official English "FF2" for SNES and the romhack FF4: Free Enterprise - but it does appear that difficulty was significantly decreased. The main details of how much it was decreased may be hidden in those "item costs are decreased" and "attributes of some equipment are modified" lines and such. Like, did every weapon get its strength tripled, or were there just a few minor weapons that got +5% strength, or what? You'd have to look into the details or try it out, I dunno. I doubt that it's a huge difference. The game is simple, and changing some stats even by a factor of two would probably just increase grinding time somewhat, which doesn't really increase difficulty much - it instead makes the game take longer. Grinding is not difficult.
Removing abilities like they did probably doesn't change difficulty much. Whether or not you have all the characters' special battle commands, you mainly need Fight, some basic healing spells, and some basic damaging spells. Having those extra commands around is good mainly because it helps support the characters and story, not because it's actually important to your battle strategy. Replacing lots of relatively rare and specialized items for curing various status effects with one easily obtained cure-all item probably doesn't make a lot of difference either. I suspect that all three SFC/SNES versions of this game were roughly equal in difficulty (with Easy Type and FF2-SNES being a bit easier than the main version of FF4J), but like I said, I haven't personally tested this.