I used to think I didn't enjoy "hard" SF so much. Then I changed my mind after reading a few really good books ("Permutation City" by Greg Egan was the main one).
The thing I like about hard SF is that it allows the exploration of questions we can't answer, but that are clearly implied by real-world science. I.e., what is consciousness? You can definitely give a great not-hard-SF exploration of this idea, that focuses on imaginary technologies and the relations people have with it. But you can also explore it from the angle of extrapolating real-world experiments, like the famous split-brain experiments, and trying to dig into what they could mean for the question of consciousness.
Permutation City asks questions which are most interesting because they are real questions we don't know the answer to.
The thing I like about hard SF is that it allows the exploration of questions we can't answer, but that are clearly implied by real-world science. I.e., what is consciousness? You can definitely give a great not-hard-SF exploration of this idea, that focuses on imaginary technologies and the relations people have with it. But you can also explore it from the angle of extrapolating real-world experiments, like the famous split-brain experiments, and trying to dig into what they could mean for the question of consciousness.
Permutation City asks questions which are most interesting because they are real questions we don't know the answer to.