I'm fine with softness in sci-fi, as long as it doesn't go too far; I am also fine with space-fantasy, but I feel it's important to distinguish the two. I don't enjoy hard sci-fi much, but I do believe if you're not going to be somewhat "crunchy" you shouldn't even claim to be sci-fi, at least not any more than Star Wars does. My favorite works are nearly always those with significant philosophical underpinnings; an example of "softer" scifi that I love would be Jack Chalker's Well World (alien miracletech can do basically anything), while about the hardest I enjoy getting is Larry Niven's Ringworld or David Brin's Uplift. Something like Honor Harrington would very likely bore me to tears, but so would a story that was too squishy and only sci-fi in name (I can't think of an example offhand, though Star Wars gets close).