I personally would not agree. But... your experiences are also real and I believe you when you say that your experiences DO support your conclusion. :) The "s

I personally would not agree. But... your experiences are also real and I believe you when you say that your experiences DO support your conclusion. :) The "soft delete" design decision is usually pretty impactful and is in my experience potentially much more of a pain in the butt to implement later if you haven't included it from day 0. Audit trails and soft-deletes are also crazy useful for developers (both for debugging and for general cover-thine-ass utility) even if end users never touch them. Whereas, tags are easier to tack on later and are not intrinsically useful to developers.