Can 2 players actually disarm the hardest bombs?

[Linio]

Hi.

So we played, and, we're not that bad. I play with my nephew, and his wits come in handy.
Nevertheless, we attained a level (e.g. 11 modules / 6 minutes or 1:20 for 4 modules) where the difficulty seems insane.
Actually it feels like there's just an incompressible amount of time to disarm each and every module, and this time (at least for two players) does simply not fit into 6 minutes.

1. Are we not as good as we think?
2. Is there luck needed at this point?
3. Should we write on the manual (friends of mine did a little table for the Venn diagram, but we felt it was like cheating...)
4. Is there just more than 2 people needed to finish those?

[Bashly]

I have in the past been able to complete the 'I Am Hardcore' bomb with the assistance of 1 expert, with a comfortable amount of time remaining. Some of it is down to the luck (as some modules do take more time than others), but a lot of it is just reducing the amount of things we have to say back and forth to each other. For example, when I want to task-switch to another module, I'd often just say one word, like 'Complicated', 'Password', 'Morse', etc. and the expert would know what I mean by that single statement. That's where you can make up a great deal of time - just by reducing the amount of communication to its most efficient form.

Using modified manual pages will certainly improve expert lookup times, but whether or not it feels like cheating is a personal preference really. Whenever I am expert, I'll have the unmodified PDF open in Foxit Reader, so that I can make notes about the bomb directly on the manual and then I can just clear those workings off later (basically a notepad/whiteboard).

[Omenpapa]

We finished everything with 1 expert, 1 defuser(have been both sides). In the end there are 1 or 2 puzzles which were easier to solo, literally, instead of relying to communicate with the expert.

In general the puzzle solving time gets a lot shorter when the defuser starts to notice and learn patterns and able to solve some puzzles on their own.