Addressing kapserd
's comment:
Likely using more than the two primes we use today would not help immensely, and likely (again) would reduce the difficulty. This is, of course, subject to the point I shall end with (below).
The reason is that there is one pair of lengths completing your right triangle for every pair combination of prime factors used. So use {3,5,7} and your combinations are {3,35}, {5,21}, and {7,15} giving you hypotenuse and other side lengths of {19,16}, {13,8}, and {11,4} respectively. (The third side is their product, 105, in all three triangles.) So now the codebreaker would have three targets instead of a single target. And adding primes makes those combinations take off.
The other point addresses the idea of using similar size primes. There is a human element to all things in human life and this is no exception. If one "must" shoot for two 350 decimal digit primes or "be sub-par at his encoding" then codebreakers will start with 350 decimal digit primes and work away from the center, so to speak. Those happen to be the most numerous of the possible numbers to examine (as SEJPM
says, one doesn't have to attack the LARGER prime, just the smaller prime). If one uses a 300 and a 400 decimal digit prime, the path to them would be MUCH MUCH longer than the path from 1 decimal digit up to 300. So expecting you to do the cleverest thing mathematically would hurt very badly if you do the cleverest thing "humanly."
(That point applies to kasperd
's smaller primes but more of them in the sense that it is, sort of, and obtusely, a way of ending up with primes to find that are a long way from the "balanced" primes SEJPM
talks about. So it maybe would get an advantage.)