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.
It's the opposite, the soft fork is much more violent than a hard fork, because it kills any mining nodes that do not comply with the new rule. A hard fork does not kill those nodes, just let those nodes become minority fork thus quickly lose support of users
In fact, the soft fork concept is deadly dangerous because it grant miners who have 51% mining hash power not only the ability to double spend or cancel transactions, but essentially change every rules of bitcoin and force it upon rest of the nodes, thus kill bitcoin
I will write a detailed analysis in a separate post