The difference is in the offer of grace and the individual's culpability for how he deals with it. It is a completely different conception of God between one who offers everyone all the grace sufficient for salvation and one who only offers such grace to those whom He chooses.
In the first case, damnation is the individual's fault for failing to respond to God. In the second, damnation is a natural result of how the person was created.
Doesn't the real question have to do with how much control God chooses to exert over His creation(s) ?
Does He call the shots on every single decision ... or is it enough that His will is, ultimately, accomplished ?
Now, of course, His omniscience mandates that He knows all, ... but is there no room for free will within His plan ?
Is there nothing that He, simply, sets in motion ... and allows to play out ?
A related question is this ... Did God create us to choose ?
Yet another question ... In what way are we the image of God ?
You should know my position, that we should be His Instruments. And that we should live our lives as if we had the capacity to choose what God wants for us, even if it all turns out cosmically and in some incomprensible way to be all scripted and staged.
I grant nearly the totality of the Calvinist position as true on a cosmic level. But it does us no good from a practical level. We must live as if what we do matters.
SD