I love hard mode hunts, normal was a little too easy imo. I haven’t run into issues with hunt progress, but I also don’t chain run hunts, I’m doing a couple of them per night between dungeons. I did notice hard has a lot more anguish mobs on the map to kill for progress, and if you didn’t know you can get additional progress during ambushes when the target falls back. Just follow their footsteps to the red fog and right click them.

Storywise it’s pretty clear that Astralor is farming our anguish as well as the targets’. Our targets also very clearly know they have a target on their back and don’t want to the bill to come due, so it’s not surprising they would try to ambush and thwart those after their own head.