Hard Mode in Wordle

I don't have to use Hard Mode in Wordle but I instinctively do, even though I've not altered the default setting. See Figure 1.

Figure 1

Setting Hard Mode to on or just adhering to it by choice can make things difficult. Today's Wordle is a good example. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

I was very happy to have guessed four out of the five letters after two tries. I was left with SHA*E and only one letter left to guess. Unfortunately, there were many possible words: SHADE, SHAKE, SHALE, SHAME, SHAPE, SHARE and SHAVE. I had the seven valid letter choices of D, K, L, M, P, R and V. 

If I'd gone by letter frequencies, highest to lowest, I wouldn't have made it. "K" has the lowest frequency of all the letters. I was lucky to get the correct word on my last try. See Figure 3 for a graph of letter frequencies in the English language.

Figure 3: source

Setting Hard Mode to off or relaxing my voluntary adherence to that mode, would it have been possible to get the correct answer for certain using my remaining four tries? What if I started with a word like PROVE? That would eliminate P, R and V with only four letters remaining: D, K, L and M. A word like MOULD would eliminate M, L and D with only K remaining. So yes, I could have definitely gotten the correct word on my fifth try.

So Hard Mode is aptly named because it does make guessing the correct word much more difficult in situations such as I encountered with COAST and SHADE.