(Another objection: it sounds more and more like the Christian take on the problem of evil, which is to say: fuck the deity that thinks it's best for us, we should take care of ourselves instead. Even if we should grow lazier and more complacent, real suffering has a higher moral cost than whatever qualities our life might lose.
Didn't most people here agree that the society of Brave New World, whatever its flaws and vices, is better than the current one?)
I'm pretty sure I'm not altogether following your thought process here, but yes, insofar as "the Christian take on the problem of evil" is to posit that human nature is such that current evil is a necessary condition of ultimately improving the human condition, then this hypothetical sounds somewhat like it. (Of course, the Christian version also has to account for why an all-powerful creator God caused human nature to have that property, which this hypothetical does not.)
As for relative moral costs... (shrug) as I've said repeatedly in this thre...
Foie gras, the delicacy made from the liver of a very fat goose (or sometimes duck), is believed to be unethical and is therefore frequently banned. For a long time, it was believed that the only way to properly fatten a goose is to continually force-feed it through a tube over several weeks, which is probably a highly unpleasant experience, although it's difficult to tell. Recently, Spanish farmer Eduardo Sousa revealed that under highly specific conditions, you can get geese to fatten themselves voluntarily.
Geese will instinctively gorge themselves when winter is coming on. Eat a goose right after it's fattened itself up for the winter, and you get a delicious treat that died happy. The problem is that geese will only do this if they believe food may become scarce during the winter (or their instinct to gorge only kicks in when the environment is such that that would be a reasonable inference; it's not clear whether it's the goose or evolution doing the analysis). If they realize that food will remain available during the winter, they eat normally. And there are quite a few possible clues--farmers trying to replicate Sousa's setup have discovered that cheating on any part leads to unfatted livers.