Hey Skye,
Welcome to ATAR Notes! Great to have you here.
Short answer: yes, absolutely possible to get a 98+ ATAR with those subjects.Longer answer - I've included some general thoughts/comments below based on your post.
→ Is it hard to get a high ATAR with those subjects? Sure - but it's hard to get a high ATAR with any subject combination. Doing five or six subjects that all scale up won't guarantee you a high ATAR. Doing subjects that all scale down don't render a high ATAR impossible. By definition of what the ATAR is (a ranking), it's difficult to rank highly under any circumstances (although I guess what you mean by a high ATAR and what constitutes something being difficult are subjective).
→ Based on what you've said, I felt really similarly in Year 10 when selecting subjects. I was hesitant about my subject selection because people around me were all choosing Methods/Spesh/LOTE subjects and whatever else - and I wasn't. I also found that daunting. But in hindsight, I'm super, super, super happy I didn't choose Methods/Spesh/LOTE subjects etc. just because other people were.
→ It's easy to view scaling as something that either "rewards" or "punishes" you based on how your subjects scale, but the whole point of scaling is to neutralise things and make everything as even a playing field as possible under the constraints of the current system. So even if somebody "benefits" from a high-scaling subject (let's use Specialist Maths for sake of example), that "benefit" is really just neutralising another factor: the idea that Specialist Maths in that year had a more competitive cohort than other subjects. In the same way, you might "suffer" from the effects of a subject that scales down (let's use a subject that I studied - HHD), but that "disadvantage" is really just neutralising another factor: the idea that HHD in that year had a less competitive cohort than other subjects.
ATAR Calc can be problematic insofar as it provides only a guide based on previous years of scaling, and it's very difficult to accurately predict your study scores for your subjects, but if you play around with different subject combinations and study scores, you should see that scoring very highly with the subjects you've listed is very possible based on previous scaling data:
https://vce.atarcalc.com/For reference, five of my six subjects scaled down - some considerably at the median study score. Only one of my subjects scaled up, and that was only by a little bit (English Language).
Please, please, please feel free to ask follow-up questions. I'm sure others will have lots to contribute to this also!