Diffusion models may be viewed as hierarchical variational autoencoders (VAEs) with two improvements: parameter sharing for the conditionals in the generative process and efficient computation of the loss as independent terms over the hierarchy. We consider two modifications that retain these advantages while increasing model flexibility. Firstly, we introduce an encoder that defines a data- and depth-dependent mean function in the diffusion process, which leads to a modified diffusion loss. Our proposed framework, DiffEnc, achieves state-of-the-art likelihood on CIFAR-10. Secondly, we let the ratio of the noise variance of the reverse encoder process and the generative process be a free weight parameter rather than being fixed to one. This leads to theoretical insights: For a finite-depth hierarchy, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) can be used as an objective for a weighted diffusion loss approach and for optimizing the noise schedule specifically for inference. For the infinite-depth hierarchy, on the other hand, the weight parameter has to be one to have a well-defined ELBO.