Best Solution For Procedural Match-3 Board?

I've been building a match-3 game and I'm trying to procedurally generate a board based on a difficulty coefficient which I calculate. The board that gets generated will be easier or more difficult based on the player's previous statistics. I know that any procedural content algorithm I choose will have to be heavily tweaked to allow for building a board from my difficulty coefficient and I have no issue with that I just need some conversation on what a decent solution would be.

The board has 10 possible panel types that can exist on any panel, uniquely. The algorithm will only have a single concern which is to generate the board. It will not generate the "gems" or handle pooling or any of that other match-3 nonsense. Whether the panels map to color or integers or patterns doesn't really matter to me. I've been looking at cellular automata as a possible solution. Maybe, I'm even over thinking this solution and there is a much easier way to accomplish the procedural board. I'm open to any good answers.