That's the great thing about soft forks, they can be very contentious... but rammed through all the same.
If we can't hard fork while a minority disagrees, we will never hard fork again = exactly what they want. Any change desired by the politburo can be soft forked in with enough
hacking creativity.
Well, each of us is likely going based on a feeling, and my feeling is that a hard fork is more dangerous than a soft fork, and I don't see any reason to do a hard fork, even based on the information that you just presented involving the potential (maybe even speculative) ability of supposedly "powerful forces" to push potentially unwanted changes via softfork.