First of all, it's on a program called Advance Map which, while it's much less user-friendly than RPGMaker, is still a functional and effective tool (I'm watching a series of tutorials for it, just about to get into the scripting portion of it). And secondly, it's definitely supposed to be more on the challenging side (the first gym, just before this route, is a double battle), though I'm pretty sure the route would need to have at least one Doctor/Nurse on it just because of the sheer length of it (it would have been bigger, but I'm pretty sure the version of Advance Map I'm using puts hard limitations on the width/height ratio; not sure if other version do that, or if it's simply something to do with the Pokemon ROM itself; i.e. that's the limitation of the GBA).