For some reason, soft class references still make a hard reference in 5.1. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who thinks otherwise…
Can you expand on that?
When it comes to cooking, sure, both soft and hard references will pull the referenced asset into the cook, that’s on purpose. But they should definitely not be counted as a hard reference at runtime during loading. An exception to that is the soft reference’s variable type, the type will be hard referenced which it shouldn’t in my opinion and why you should usually have a C++ class as the variable type, but anything you put as the value shouldn’t be hard referenced.