I know you were answered, but I'll explain a bit further (as well as why soft-delete wasn't in beta 2).
Hard delete permanently removes an item from the database, you can't recover it once that is done. Soft-delete however just becomes "invisible" to people who can't see what are almost like moderated items. The problem with soft-delete however, and why it wasn't in beta 2, was because I have to rework some of the query fetching to do so to calculate how many posts can be viewed by the current visitor, and if they can view soft-deleted comments, raise the count back up and figure out how many posts they can now view, then use those numbers to calculate how many pages to display, etc.
Wasn't a quick 2-minute job.
So soft-deletes will probably be the first thing to take care of once I get the bugs out of the way.