It's understandable to want to avoid pain. It's our natural instinct to try to minimize pain and maximize pleasure (to a degree). I do think the fixation on pain is a small, but subtle flag that a person isn't totally ready to ctb...which is fine, of course
I say this because I think of all the people who've committed suicide through full suspension hanging, with shoelaces and bedsheets and scarves in prisons or institutions, from jumping off buildings, even things like seppuku or drinking drain cleaner etc. These people don't think about pain or try to minimize it as much as possible. They just do it. They pick a method and they go because they've firmly decided within that the pain of living far exceeds the potential pain of whatever method they choose to die.
Those are the ones who ctb successfully. Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it seems to be the case for a lot of people, including those of us on this forum. I don't think there's a totally painless death for 99.9% of people who ctb because it's our bodies natural inclination to fight unnatural and premature death whenever possible, using a wide array of physiological and mental faculties, pain being one of them. For the people truly dead-set on suicide, however, none of that is enough to deter them once they've made their final choice. That seems to be the key distinction between those who do and those who don't; the people who ctb successfully know that there likely will be pain during death, but they do it anyway. I don't think that's the answer a lot of us here (myself included, because fuck pain
) want to hear, but it seems to be the case