I am also correct in saying that doing segwit as a hardfork makes it much more efficient.
This would take a lot more time, and wouldn't be "much more efficient" in it's current state. Deploying it with a hard fork isn't even a big change. There was a post by maaku on reddit stating that it's rather just a few lines of code.
Can they hardfork the ability for Node hosts to get a small reward? It would be nice to upgrade my Raspberry Pi.
A hard fork can pretty much change anything. However, the question is always "Should we change that?". The answer to your suggestion is a clear: Not likely going to happen.