Hmm... I always took soft vore to mean swallowing without chewing, regardless of whether the prey dies or lives is digested or absorbed or passes through, and hard vore to mean biting and crunching, drawing blood and tearing skin and snapping bones, etc. Hard vore would be the 'natural' kind of eating for all but a few species (snakes, frogs, etc.).
I've never been a fan of vore that didn't involved death for the prey. (I'm actually trying to broaden this horizon a little now, and try out some endo, etc.). I don't really care much about the digestion or anything following - for me my interest ends pretty much when the prey dies, which I assume is within minutes of reaching the stomach if not sooner - but the sine qua non of vore for me is that the pred is -taking- something from the prey, that they are being selfish and putting their desires, no matter how trivial ("I'm not even hungry, but you taste so yummy!") above the prey's very life. Without fatality, or some substantial cost to the prey, that aspect is lost and it just becomes mouthplay (which, frankly, is also fun, but not the same).
Hard vore is something I had a love-hate relationship with for a very long time. I liked chewing, but the pain and destruction involved freaked me out, so I'd try to imagine some scenario where the pred harmlessly masticated their prey before swallowing, which basically turned the preds into muppets. I kind of like gore and body horror ("Oh my god, look what you're -doing- to me!"), but I don't really respond well to sadism, and the amount of pain involves basically overwhelms the possibility of any other prey response, so the interaction between them is lost - or so I imagined it.
Lately, though, my interests have been turning more and more toward hard vore. They've always occasionally flirted that way anyway, but, for example, stories that are in the middle of being written are rewriting themselves as hard vore, and more and more often the kind of RP I've been looking for has been hard vore. It -is- a little more horrifying, but I find that it feels a lot more natural - there isn't any need to fudge physics to make it work (though you can if you want to), and if anything it only deepens the rift between pred and prey, requiring -more- interaction to bridge the gap, which I really like. Now, if there's a soothing pred, they have very good reason to soothe the prey- not just assuaging their fears, but tending to all the wounds and pain they're inflicting. The predator doesn't have to be sadistic, but it really can demonstrate callousness, which sometimes I like.
So, yes - gradually I'm liking hard vore more, and soft vore is moving into a back seat position. From a purely artistic/writerly point of view, I find this exciting in terms of new territory, but also a bit of a bummer. I know that each time I post something hard vorish, I end up shedding some watchers.
But, you've got to write what you love, right?
