Science fiction authors just need to be told "it is okay, you can have ideas." to be saved from the "hard-scifi" vicious cycle of making some object of popular science at the time of writing save the galaxy or stop the evil aliens or whatever. You can have ideas about society and miraculous technology and also write gritty stuff, you are allowed to be creative. It is okay! Pick your own balance instead of selecting the current preset of what is "realistic", because that only ages. Whatever seems 'realistic' to you is all it is. Realistic to the you of the now. It is such an arbitrary goal of writing style to be defined by "hard scifi" that the only giveaway something is "hard scifi" work is just when it seems incredibly dated and unoriginal. "Oh I see, it is like that because the British guy thought like this in the 90s" is all I get from it, not realism, or even much of a sense of "grittiness" (media is only ever getting less restrained over time). Just go ahead and call it "incredibly clockable space opera" because you tell more about yourself than any kind of seriously objective future. Maybe it would be worth doing more collaborative work with a higher variety of perspectives if you were actually serious about that goal of the subgenre.