Hot peppers are not all the same even when they are the same kind if grown different places, in different soil, or even depending on what is near them..
I like hot, but have gotten away from much of the "arms race" in hot peppers. I like a lot of hot ethnic foods, and have found that even the folks from hot food areas are more like me, When they ask how I want food spiced, I always answer "the same as you would like it", and I have yet to have anything uneatable. The food has indeed often been very spicy, but always something I can deal with. I want flavor with the "heat".
The rest of the family is not into very hot peppers, so most food made at the house is not as hot. And some friends are totally unable to deal with spicy food, so for them we have to do even less, or set aside their portion. Others like it hotter than most, such as one neighbor from Malaysia, who gets near the top of my preferred range. I should grow some bhut jolokia peppers for her.
Ghost peppers and reapers are usually stupid hot if you slice off a piece and eat it. But that is not how the food is, there is something other than hot peppers in it, generally, even if it is just the tortilla the pepper sauce is smeared on. So generally the pepper type influences how many peppers are in the food.
If you grow hot peppers near ordinary peppers, the pollination from the ordinary ones will lower the heat. I always have to put a hotter pepper "border" around any hot pepper patch, so that there is less mixing with regular poblano and italian sandwich peppers like giant Marconi, that we also grow. Presumably the hottest ones will be in the middle of the patch.
