How?
> worse for ease of use
How?
> worse for practically every criterion you could think about.
I can think of lots of criteria, but very few on which I can see a compelling argument for REST being inferior to SOAP except "degree of support from libraries written to support SOAP".
At the transport level you get much richer and more structured client code from SOAP. Automated HATEOAS clients are at this point purely theoretical, and anything you could put a content-type on and send over HATEOAS you could equally embed in a SOAP response. If the thing you wanted to embed can be expressed as XML, you can do much better.
HATEOAS doesn't inherently require that you "go" anywhere to get a hypertext document describing an API, and can be as complete as you want. But, since its really designed for web-scale decentralized interlinked APIs, no, its not primarily intended to have one document that gives you every possible linked endpoint.
> Automated HATEOAS clients are at this point purely theoretical
Googlebot is an example of an automated HATEOAS client that handles a wide array of content types. It is decidedly not purely theoretical.
The HTTP-powered Web is the prototypical REST (including the HATEOAS constraint that is part of the definintion of REST) API.
But that's because REST is often used as a buzzword by people who don't know what the architectural style entails, or aspirationally to describe one goal of the design of an API, but one that may be compromised for conflicting goals.