Why aren't people playing Hard Mode? Lots of reasons. But there are ways to fix these problems...
- Difficulty: Yes, Hard Mode is hard. But it's Hard for the wrong reasons: It might have just been called "You Must Bring Two Copies of Protective Spirit Here" Mode. There is no way you'll beat a large majority of the Elementalist/Ritualist bosses without a good Protective Spirit. The difficulty itself doesn't need to be changed; the PvE Sunspear skills might make Hard Mode easier. But could there be a little retweaking of the the bosses who deal 500+ damage Meteors?
- Reward: You have to go for broke in Hard Mode just to get something out of it. Legendary Guardian/Vanquisher or bust. After that...what then? Those titles need to hold a little more significance due to the difficulty involved. A small step would be to change the reward for Vanquishing an area to 10g per enemy, no EXP. Areas tend to have 200ish enemies, so it would be 2k per area. It's a decent Reward::Time.
- Hard Mode Unique Loot: How often do you see Tomes drop? Scrolls? Too rarely, for what they do. Tomes/Scrolls are basically a 1k gold drop. But keep in mind...THIS IS HARD MODE! Loot should scale accordingly! Permanently increase the drop rates on Scrolls/Tomes (I recommend atleast 5x. Seriously. Convience doesn't hurt the economy.) and people will be a lot happier.
- Anti-Farming in Hard Mode: Gaile Grey said that the Anti-Farming code isn't in Hard Mode. I, among many others with personal anecdotes, think she is wrong. A confirmation of either event would go a long way in Hard Mode PR.
- LFG: Human parties can offer a huge advantage over Henchman/Heroes (even moreso if the PvE Sunspear skills are decent). Of course, it's hard to find people when they are spead across 56 missions, thus forces a reliability on H/H, Guildies. The only way to fix it is to make the Party Search affect the entire world for Hard Mode. Communities shouldn't have to have their own solution to this problem (although people such have Dralspire and Azarel STX have helped.)
I know many people have given up on GW's PvE due to its Sysphisian nature and gone to WoW instead (which takes a few months before it suffers from a Sysphisian nature). ArenaNet just finished with the ATS; can't they look at the PvE side of the game for once? (like maybe releasing the aforementioned Sunspear PvE skills which were intended to be released with Hard Mode a month ago?)