Choosing to ignore sociology and social relations is not "hard science" or "materialism." That's like saying that if you recognize chemical compounds, you might as well "go back to the church and PRAY" because the only real material thing that exists are atoms (or subatomic particles, if you prefer). Just as chemistry is a field of science that studies the relation of atoms at the molecular level, just as biology is a field of science that studies the interaction of molecules at a cellular level, sociology is a scientific field that studies the interactions of individuals at a societal level. There is nothing "mystical" or "immaterial" about it.
When I say, for example, that cultures that have the memory of first getting vaccines in living memory tend to be more favorable towards vaccines and less prone to conspiracy theories about them, that is materialism! The material fact of whether the vaccine was available or not is what shaped the cultural ideas. Materialism doesn't end at the quality of an object itself. The historical availablity of an object, which is both a material fact and a social relation, also affect the way people think about it.
What you're doing is some bizarre, vulgarized form of materialism that disregards entirely material relations and the long term effects of material events on people's thought processes, and instead attributes everything a person thinks about a particular object to the object's innate qualities. This is nonsense, it's a misunderstanding of what materialism is.
There are countless examples that prove this. For example, Spain once found tons of platinum in America and dumped it because they considered it worthless. If the reasons we value platinum have to do with it's innate qualities, then the Spanish and everyone else at the time would have valued it as much as we do today.