みなさんのコメントを どうもありがとう！
I learned a lot from all of you.
The one thing I learned most is that a lot of the difference between katakana and hiragana is simply by the way they look. When an author wants to convey a sharp, emphasized, different type of feeling, he'll use katakana.
It's not true that all onomatopoeia is katakana. It just so happens that many sounds worthy of being written down is either sharp, strange, or different, and so katakana covers most of onomatopoeia. Hiragana can be used for soft sounds though, like when the audience goes "ooooooo" after something interesting happens on stage.
It seems katakana vs. hiragana has a lot of parallels in the English language as well. When we want to grab someone's attention, we often TYPE LIKE THIS or like this. I think katakana works the same way when normally hiragana/kanji words are written in katakana. It's the only way to emphasize something since Japanese does not have capital letters.
This property translates as well into foreign words. I thought of how in English sometimes we say carpe diem, c'est la vie, comme ci comme ca, hola, "nee hao", etc. and we try to say them emphasized, or in a faked accent, or whatever because they stand out and seem fresh/interesting/different. This is probably an effect inherent in katakana that the Roman alphabet does not capture.
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