Honestly, people who complain about softened water feeling slimy crack me up so hard.
I grew up and lived in areas with natural soft water my entire life.
Just like Greg and Glen mention above, areas with hard water make me feel like I can't remove the dirt from my hair and skin.
Soft water may take a little longer to rinse but it's no big deal.
Another thing that makes me crack up is how the "minerals" in hard water are "healthy". Honey, puhleeeaze! That is so little in the way you need everyday to survive that if you're counting on getting your minerals from hard water, you'll be in deep trouble soon.
And, since I'm up, I'm here to talk about the "problem" of hard water and places trying to regulate if you need to use sodium or potassium in your softener.
I'd like to tell the administrators in those places to grow the frak up.
They should be able to remove most of the minerals (and bring the water minerals to a bit under 4 grains/gallon, which is "naturally soft" and doesn't cause too many problems) at the treatment plant before distribution, in fact, they *should* be doing that for multiple reasons. Flocculation/agglomeration, for example, is used very often to purify water and, when done properly, can remove not only calcium and magnesium, it will also remove bad stuff like arsenic, which is a problem that occurs naturally in many places.
This is yet another area in American culture where "individualism" bites us in the butt, because water softening with resin (ion exchange) is annoying and expensive, and there should be *no* need for each person to do it in their own homes, when it should be done more cheaply at the treatment plant.
I'm not saying we should ban water softeners, btw, I'm saying those should be reserved for people in rural areas with private wells. People on city water should receive good quality water, not stuff we need to soften, filter, purify further.
And I'll say more, people outside US keep seeing our exported media and pressuring their local administration to offer clean, safe, drinkable water "the way they do it in US" when they see our media portraying people drinking from water fountains and/or drinking from the water faucet.
Little do they know, it's not actually true in many places, like the place in WI which got a lot of people sick about 20 years ago to this very day in Detroit, among many other places. More's the pity.