After posting in this thread a few times, I feel compelled for some reason to actually answer the post of the OP.
Anybody who protests that the badness of worldly suffering isn’t the baddest possible badness ever is missing two critical things - the first being the point of mentioning suffering in the first place, and secondly, the fact that you cannot rely upon your assumptions about your opponent’s assumptions about suffering and Hell.
The first point has been covered adequetely: the fact that people get colds is more than sufficient to completely and utterly debunk the Omnimax god. That’s all it takes! Any unnecessary suffering at all does it. If the person admits that unnecessary suffering of any kind exists in the real world, then the discussion is over and all that remains is to sort out which attributes the beleiver is willing to strip from their god to make it consistent with a universe in which unnecessary suffering occurs. (In my observation it’s usually omnipotence.)
The second point is relevent because, aside from failing to comprehend the full implications of omnipotence, the best ways to argue against the POE are to either blow off the suffering, to to blame it on free will. Colds might be addressed with the former tactic - a person might claim that they’re not a big enough problem to merit “fixing”. This is why a person might try to choose the most horrific examples of suffering possible as their examples of suffering*.
Hell, on the other hand, is very tricky as an example of anything. Some people argue that Hell is something that you deliberately choose yourself - that it’s basically self-inflicted, and thus it doesn’t qualify. Other people argue - I’m not kidding here - argue that it’s actually not all that bad. (See the mormon beliefs about the afterlife.) And of course there’s also that set of theists who don’t believe in it at all (possibly due to it being obviously incompatible with a just or benevolent God).
To the person making the POE argument, you can never tell what sort of theist you’re talking to, making arguing from Hell problematic at best - if you do argue from Hell you restrict the set of people to whom your argument will seem significant. Horrific suffering against innocents on earth, on the other hand, is not a matter of belief. Most of the potential dodges from the POE fail when faced with them, much more than when you try to flash the believer-specific hell card. This is a simple explanation for why earthy suffering is often focused on rather than possibly-imagined and not-universally-accepted afterlife suffering when making POE arguments.
- An interesting variant dodge of the “that’s not real suffering” type are the ones where it’s asserted that all earthy suffering is ephemeral and insignificant, as in completely insignificant, because we’re really all just immortal spirits who will shrug off the experiences of life good or bad anyway. This is interesting because if you think about it, it’s actually an argument against omnibenevolence. In this, God doesn’t actually love us - he may love the spirits that animate us, but since they don’t share our experiences or cares, they’re not the same people as we are. And thus it’s actually a concession of the POE, not a victory over it, because it “wins” by conceding the omnimax factor. (And of course by also justifying every possibly form of heinous brutality man can commit.)
God in this scenario sees us as ants, or perhaps more accurately, video game characters. Something to be crushed and killed willy-nilly with not a fleeting care for its welfare, and even perhaps for the sheer amusement of it. One supposes that in its own context this God-ting might not consider itself evil, but in our context, of course, it’s a horrific monster to be feared and loathed without end.