Here's the deal-every class hears that they're the absolute worst in USAFA history and their training wasn't hard. Unfortunately for 2017, there were some changes to the BCT training philosophy that upperclass cadets could actually point to as making our training softer. The difficulty of your basic and freshman training will be extremely squadron dependent, and just because you make it through something harder or easier than someone else really doesn't say anything about how good of a cadet you are or how well you have actually been trained.
As a quick anecdotal point though, the 2016 cadets in my squadron gave my classmates the hardest time about how easy our basic was, even though none of them were cadre. However, they pretty much uniformly told us that our recognition was difficult, even though, in my opinion, it was proportionally difficult to our basic (if that makes sense.) Things look different from the other side.
Bottom line: You have absolutely no control over the difficulty of your training or how others perceive that difficulty. All you can control is how well you perform.