The original post sounds like three things are going wrong:

1. The scrum team is not a team
2. The stand-up meeting is used to report progress instead of coordinating work.
3. Work on hard problems is not recognized.

The purpose of the daily scrum meeting is not to report progress to the manager or product owner, the daily scrum meeting is for team members to coordinate between each other. Since in a working scrum team your main audience is fellow developers, everyone usually understands how hard the task is you are working on, and if you pick up the most difficult tasks of the sprint and report partial progress nobody will think that you are slowing down the team.

If you don't already do, I suggest using story points to estimate the complexity of stories, this can make it clear for outsiders how hard your work is: If A does 1 finishes story and B finishes 5 it is a different picture than B finishes 5 1-point stories and A finishes 1 13-point story.

But the most important change to me is to stop seeing the work as individual developers working on their own stories. In my experience Scrum works best, when team commits to the sprint backlog as a team, works on it as team and achieves the sprint goal together as a team.

If you work as a team you would not wait for the most complex story of the sprint to be picked up by the last person, you would discuss it in the team daily scrum:
A: "Hey story X looks really big should we do it first? Who will work on it?"
B: "Oh I could do it, but I have never done Y before, other than that I can manage."
C: "I know how to do Y, I can help you with that."

The original post sounds like three things are going wrong:

1. The scrum team is not a team
2. The stand-up meeting is used to report progress instead of coordinating work.
3. Work on hard problems is not recognized.

The purpose of the daily scrum meeting is not to report progress to the manager or product owner: the daily scrum meeting is for team members to coordinate between each other. Since in a working scrum team your main audience is fellow developers, everyone usually understands how hard the task is you are working on, and if you pick up the most difficult tasks of the sprint and report partial progress nobody will think that you are slowing down the team.

If you don't already do so, I suggest using story points to estimate the complexity of stories. This can make it clear for outsiders how hard your work is: If A finishes one story and B finishes five, it is a different picture than B finishes five 1-point stories and A finishes one 13-point story.

But the most important change to me is to stop seeing the work as individual developers working on their own stories. In my experience Scrum works best when the team commits to the sprint backlog as a team, works on it as team and achieves the sprint goal together as a team.

If you work as a team you would not wait for the most complex story of the sprint to be picked up by the last person, you would discuss it in the team daily scrum:

• A: "Hey story X looks really big; should we do it first? Who will work on it?"
• B: "Oh I could do it, but I have never done Y before, other than that I can manage."
• C: "I know how to do Y, I can help you with that."