Difficultness in a sentence as a noun

Your statement also makes no sense: the phrase 'politely toxic' is an oxymoron - as when one 'politely disagrees', it suggests reasonable disagreement, not outright difficultness. Further, "good, and in some cases legally required, work" can be work that have nothing to do with the end goals - it could even be baseline administrative work.

Difficultness definitions

noun

the quality of being difficult; "they agreed about the difficulty of the climb"

See also: difficulty