haven't heard much by mark richardson, phil reynolds etc.. so can't comment a lot but i did pick up one beast on nukleuz purple by mark richardson called hard drive. got a 140bpm mix on the b side and its hard as @#%$. i do agree with you though about a lot of English 'hard trance' - seems to be a lot of the tidy/nukleuz djs and producers are using the genre of 'hard trance' to define the tunes they are producing, which i think misguides people as to what REAL hard trance is!