I totally see where you're going with this post: use a catchy name, instead of a descriptive one, and maybe it is the right thing to do from a marketing perspective.

But at the same time, when I think of all the damage that terms like "smart contracts" have done in the long run to people's ability to reason about blockchain capabilities, I'm not sure I can get behind the idea.

At least in the case of smart contracts, a full description of what they actually are might have led to the coining of the name. After all, saying something like "our blockchain supports adding computational algorithms without requiring a consensual upgrade of the software" is a bit of a mouthful. So much easier to say our blockchain supports smart contracts, even thought that sounds like it means something else.

But if I get the meaning of what you're referring to as "soft consensus"/"soft contracts", you're just referring to custom/arbitrary data that is stored in the blockchain. So it could just be called "customized consensus data" or "custom decentralized data", which is considerably more descriptive, I think, than your terms. I'm only putting the term "custom" in there to indicate the format of the data is left up to the person introducing the data, maybe there's a better word. On the other hard, I do admit your terms are more "cool sounding", so maybe marketing buzzwords are the pragmatic way to go. It just pains me to hear them.