I was introduced to the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" some 10 years ago in high school philosophy class, and have been mulling over it ever since. Today I am sympathetic to Dennett's argument in Consciousness Explained: there is no single Cartesian theater, there are several processes in the brain which are the same thing (up to the precision of definition of same) as we internally experience, and many properties we tend to attribute to that features of internal experience, consciousness and "qualia" are myths. My personal favorite hypothesis is that those myths arise from quirks of our ability to talk and think and have a narrative about our experience.

So, if sentience is much less special and much more incoherent phenomenon than the Enlightenment thinkers who made it the crown of the human superiority would have thought, and consequently the whole concept is more akin to teleological physics of Aristotle than an apt name for what really happens ... then attributing moral value to sentience alone seems less compelling take than it initially would seem.

Personally, I find Benjamin Franklin's reasoning to cease vegetarianism quite logical. Animals are allowed to eat animals.