[deerIRL]

As someone who has done development work with Class A data and specifically in the realm of justice, soft deletes aren't simply a good idea, they are required by law.

Most of these downsides are easily mitigatable issues as well. As many users have stated, something like views solves the issue of forgetting the 'deleted' clause.

Lastly, I'm not sure the issue with foreign keys/stray records really resonates with me. I'd be hard pressed to be comfortable allowing a developer or DBA who isn't fully comfortable with the data model to be hard deleting records, let alone flagging them as soft deleted.