At least on my part it's mostly just light-hearted teasing. I don't care for normal mode but I'm not offended by others playing it and I can absolutely acknowledge that it takes a different - and in some ways superior - skill set to play it effectively. Part of the reason I don't like it is that it feels like you are very much pigeon-holed into using a certain loadout on certain classes and that is boring to me. In hardcore every gun and loadout combination is effective in the right situations and even in the wrong situations you can still come out on top if you manage to get the jump on your opponent. If you start shooting someone first with the SAR-21 in hardcore, even in close range, you will probably win whereas in my experience it is entirely possible for someone in softcore to spin around and unload their high rate of fire death machine on you and come out victorious because of their high ( or is it low? I'm not good at math ) time-to-kill ratio.
I get bored using the same guns all the time. In softcore, where the "meta" is very rigid and favors high ROF guns, I am not able to switch my guns around as much as I'd like to. Hardcore on the other hand allows me to switch from a high ROF death machine to something more methodical and still maintain a similar performance level. Also shotguns. BF4 hardcore is the only game I have played where shotguns don't feel completely worthless at anything other than spitting distance. Shotguns are cool and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.
