Nobody should neither impose hard fork nor soft fork without consensus IMHO, not even on core.

Although I believe that with a soft fork, everything keeps working for everyone and with a hard fork there are users who can't see some transactions, and think they haven't gotten paid when they have.
But with soft forks, the protocol in 10 or 20 years is going to be a horrible and confusing mess.

TL;DR soft forks are grotesque. Hard forks are violent.