your both very right, Hard Dance is the very new Tidy image they are trying to project, in other words to remarket them same old crap under a new flag... so more and more shiny pennies can be made.

I know there are some tracks out there which are very awkward to call between hard house or trance/comercial trance as they have aspects of each in there, but it's still the ingriedents from two genres which have been raped by labels like Tidy... the underground trance scene has superseeded the hard dance today 3 years ago through the german/swiss sound, and until more recently Hard Style of Italy & Holland.

Bah. All I say is that unless you are directly playing what you feel is Hard Dance then not to worry about this too much. At the end of the day, people who take the time to know about todays hard trance / hardstyle SHOULD be able to spot the obvious differences.