Pretty sure you never had to do normal mode in order to do the hard mode. Jumped straight into Battle of Ilum, Directive 7, and False Emperor on hard mode without doing normal mode although I did have to do the small Role-play quest then drop it once you get to the point where you have to clear the instance on normal.

Yes, Boarding Party as well as Foundry, Directive 7, Battle of Ilum, and False Emperor have a similar amount of dialogue as Black Talon. The flashpoints that the people in this thread have been complaining about are the ones that were added in due to the fact that the jump from BT to Boarding Party would be 15-20 levels where there is no appropriate leveled instance. I would rather have the extra flash points with less interactions/story-telling than to go from easy mode 2 man Black Talon to Boarding Party.

Power increases your bonus healing although it's only by about 0.17 every 1 power (1.8 bonus healing with 41 power and 66.5 bonus healing with 391 power). The thing with crit is that you have to factor in the crit bonus or surge rating to measure on average how much extra healing it does in comparison with power. Crit rating and surge have diminishing returns unfortunately as with only 41 crit rating I had a 1.80% increased crit chance (0.043 for 1 crit rating) vs 296 crit rating gave 10.79% (0.036 for 1 crit rating).

From what I remember reading and hearing Hammerstation, Athiss, Mandalorian Raiders, and Cadamimu weren't originally planned to be flashpoints (further confirmed since the only Hard Mode Flashpoints are BT, Boarding Party, Foundry, Directive 7, Battle of Ilum, and False Emperor). Therefore the progression from flashpoints would be from Black Talon to Boarding Party which would leave approximately 20 levels where there was no appropriate level flashpoint. If they didn't add those flashpoints in, people would be complaining about how there aren't enough flashpoints between level 15-30.

Didn't have to for False Emperor and Battle of Ilum. Can't say for certain about the others since I ran them on normal while leveling but I would assume that if you can run the last two without doing them on normal, you should be able to do all of them on hard mode without having cleared normal mode first.

HK-47 in the False Emperor dropped a Vibrosword on my first hard mode kill. It kind of looks like a glowing red lance.

Did this today and did not get any loot for the 2nd boss and last boss. For the first boss we killed left healer, right healer, and then boss and did get loot. The second boss we killed right droid, left droid, then boss and did not get loot. Third boss killed healer, shield guy, then boss and did not get loot. Don't know how most groups would be able to kill the last boss in the correct order unless they were way overgeared or past the level of the boarding party flash point.