I dont know why people consistenty make this mistake: Lyn, when describing softforking vs hardforking you talking about being "backwards compatible" or not. Wrong; its about being forward compatible or not. 
For example: if we were to hardfork to big blocks right now, it is backwards compatible; all the small block stuff is valid under bigblock rules. Yet it is not forward compatible, because the new bigblock stuff is not valid under old smallblock rules.