While I know the difference between a hard pull and a soft pull - the hards do affect your credit score, the soft ones don't - what I have always wondered about is the difference in the credit reports that you/I get when requesting one, and the version that creditors get when they pull a hard one on you. The propaganda advertisements of the credit bureaus to get you to request your report always carry the sentence "see for yourself what your creditors see".
That's a great question. Creditors do pay different amounts for different types of information, but those hard pulls I have seen really do provide everything you see in your credit report in a slightly different format. One major difference is they can't see the softs, but you can see them when you order a report directly from the CRA.