If you can comfortably beat the micros at those stakes the b55 and 11c/22c should be good learning/proving grounds for you where you are also probably +EV.  The latter two are more reg filled and play deep (but are cheaper than a SM entry) and you get to play deep in a slow structure vs regs and fish which is a good barometer of your game and helps you improve imo.

b55 is soft enough, esp on weekends, that your exploitative play vs fish you know so well will bring you far often enough I can't imagine a very +EV micro grinder is -EV in the b55.

That said, yes, the regs who play MSMTT/HSMTT BIs as their main game are that much better than the SSMTT regs, and they exploit bad/SSMTT regs very well by playing solid and owning them in spots where most SS/MSMTT bad regs are out of balance or are running silly bluffs or calling way too wide or folding too much etc.  You need to consider your whole range vs regs and come up with a solid default gameplan.  Imo watch some of the amazing vids here, im new to membership here but I've binge watched alot and these MTT vids far surpass the quality Ive seen on the site I used to have a membership on.  I just watched Sam Graffton's 22c vid series today and it was well worht the watch, I'd recommend it for your situation (and near everyones)

on playing higher stakes you need to be looking more into opponent selection tha mid-low stakes. I recommend watching more cash game videos, looking better into spots, discussing cash game hands because to maintain yourself playing hsmtt is not that easy since the variance is huge. 

also, study a lot of preflop game. most of these guys are preflop monsters and when you get deep on this tournaments usually we are not that deep, avg is around 20-30bb and re-stealing spots are very profitable. take a deeper look into icmizer (not for icm lol) and start thinking on the cEV of some preflop spots, which stats give you more information about his fold equity and things like that.

Yes, they are that much better. When moving up stakes in MTTs what I've always done was add the next level up that I wasn't exactly comfortable with while subtracting the bottom of my buy in range and keeping everything in-between. That way you keep your bread and butter tournaments while "taking shots". Also be sure to game select when moving up. Look for the highest value tournaments possible and avoid the ones that are more filled with regs. 

I think what DialingUP420 said is spot on.

When you move up to smaller fields, larger buy ins and better fields no one really wants to give you a lot of chips lol. I miss that