That's not the reason that the EU has made the process so difficult.
They made it so difficult and so scary to warn the other states to not even try to think about an exit.
How is that democratic?
If the EU is so convinced that the only way is the EU way they should have made it easy for the UK to leave, then watch it as it burned to the ground and groveled to try to buy its way back into the EU then maybe the other states would have thought: Gee, it did not work for the EU but at least now we know and we won't try!
Instead, the EU is trying to make an example of the Uk as a show of force to the other states. The EU is ruling with fear and acting like a bully!
And that's forgetting the fact the EU leaders could have seen Brexit as a wake-up call and maybe changed the course of action and reform the EU from within to give people what they fucking promised when this thing was made in the first place: prosperity, safety, so on and so forth.
Instead, they march forward with more integration, more federalism, more Europe, as if the nations don't count anymore. Free trade is the new God in town and it doesn't take prisoners.
Lets forget the fact the economic growth for the EU is one of the weakest in the world for the last 15 years, that the youth unemployment rate is roughly 25% and that because the wages are so low due to the enormous amount of tax being paid by the companies and citizens, they have resorted to importing people from 3rd world countries in order to fill job vacancies that only exists because nobody can actually afford to work for such a low wage.
A new age of slavery built on top of migrant workers.
Ain't the EU pretty?
God forbid you are against them! 30 years ago if you showed any sign of reservation towards unregulated capitalism you were labeled a communist and shamed by the major political parties, nowadays if you are against the EU, you are labeled as backward, illiterate and racist/fascist/populist.
The words have changed, the technics are the same.