Fictional Fans

I will fight you over whether social science speculation counts as hard SF!
I actually think this is a trichotomy for me between hard, soft, and social SF? Hard SF looks at natural/non-anthropological sciences and looks how they could impact a story or what it would be like if they were different (e.g. "the speed of light is now 40 km/h and you get relativistic effects when you run"), social SF looks at social/anthropological sciences and asks equivalent what if-questions based on those instead, and soft SF is interested in personal stories on a SF backdrop, usually. From my POV Star Trek is mostly soft SF with occasional/past forays into social SF, and I keep running into people who insist it's actually super hard SF. (One of them is, unfortunately, a coworker.)

I will give you that it might've been less soft in the past, but they seem to have been very willing to abandon that basically as soon as possible. And the space battles are so bad I cry in physicist, but that's a problem it shares with literally every SF TV show/movie I've watched save for Babylon 5.