Is logo design the hardest thing ever?

Last night I was working on my new logo for Fort McHenry (impossible to avoid: using a flag theme)...thinking that logo design has got to be the hardest design task ever. Do you all agree? It's super difficult to come up with something that invokes the spirit of the company or nonprofit or whatever in a way that is Good Design: ie, not TOO literal but not TOO ephemeral, clean, usable small or large, etc.

We're lucky in project 1 in that we don't reeeally have to please a client, only our own designer selves and our peers. But my limited experience in logo design for outsiders has been painful, to say the least. I volunteered on to work on a logo once for a dog rescue that concentrated on bull breeds -- not just pit bulls but also all the other kinds of bull breeds there are, and there are a lot, and the client wanted silhouettes of all of them to appear in the logo. Actually, she wanted photos in the logo, but I was able to successfully nix that idea in working with her. After a ton of versions, she changed her mind and decided to keep the original logo-type-thing:

Oh, well. It was a lesson to me in the difficulty of working with clients that want everything but the kitchen sink to appear on their business cards, and the challenge of conveying a solid message in an image-based logo. (Also a lesson in how not to work for free.) But even if this client had put herself totally in my hands, it would've been difficult. You want something recognizable and not totally ordinary. It's very challenging to distill an entire entity down to one image. So this is why I kind of dread logo design...