yes - I've thought exactly the same thing. The highest I ever get is not much past 1400, and because I work day and night with no sleep, I regularly end up majorly losing focus and dropping down to 1200 or less probably (literally, I might lose 20 or so games in a row!!!) which has happened on more than one occasion!) - After which, at some point I end up getting some well deserved ZZZs, and start focusing again. But the struggle seems more difficult getting past the 1200s than it does getting back to 1400!! - and I'm sure I've noticed this every time. It's a strange imbalance. But like you say, it's probably due to 1200 being one of the optional starting points when joining chess.com, so there's likely to be a larger proportion of people with disproportionate ratings at that point -- and it's probably the same at the 800 point too and whatever the other one is. But then again, that natural anomaly should include weaker players aswell as the stronger ones, - in fact, starting off we're probably more likely to OVER-estimate how good we are at chess I reckon. - plus the fact that there are gonna be more people that aren't new to chess.com that happen to have balanced out to 1200 or so, so the pool of new players (to chess.com) shouldn't significantly affect this. Oh, I don't know - every time I think of what it might be, it just raises further questions. I will stop thinking immediately. There - turns out that's all I needed to do. Ah, that's much better.
Was it just me, or 1050-1150 players are actually stronger than 1150-1250 players
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I have been up-and-down around 1000-1400 with my blitz game, and have an interesting observation: players rated between 1050-1150, on average, are actually stronger than players rated 1150-1250, in blitz.
My explanation is that there are many new players starting their blitz game at a default rate of 1200, instead of starting from 800. And then they hang around at 1150-1250 for a while. These players are weaker than those who have started from 800 and worked all their way up to 1050-1150.
Do you have similar experience?