I had to look up what hard mode entailed, and... although I don't have the game set to hard mode, that's actually how I've already been playing. It never really occurred to me to use a word that wasn't at least a possible answer based on what had been revealed so far. (Granted, today is only my third day playing.) May I ask how these other strategies you mention make the game more fun?
Today was also the first day I got one in three guesses. Sure, there was some luck involved, but isn't there always?
A week or so ago there was a puzzle where after 3 guesses I had -ATCH.
So I had three more tries, and it could have equally been BATCH, LATCH, WATCH, CATCH, or HATCH. (I had already eliminated P).
If I just guess one, I have a 3/5 chance to win. So instead I played BLOWS. The W lit up yellow and I had my answer. If I was playing on Hard mode, it wouldn't have been harder, it would have just been more random.
The best strategy I've found is, if you get a yellow, include it in all further guesses, but if you get a green, don't try it again until you're ready to guess the real answer. Because you will get no new information from guessing a letter whose position you already know.
Anyone following the controversy over people saying some Wordles are too hard? Yesterday's was EPOXY. I've had no problem with the strategy I described but I can see words like that and today's word wouldn't occur to people who don't play a lot of word games.
Also, anyone found good wordle variants? There's one called Semantle, which lets you guess any word, and it tells you how close the meaning is to the target word according to text analytics. My record is 23 but it often takes over 100 guesses.
If so, congratulations! 
