Soft consensus is nothing more than a receipt that you are owed something, it isn't in and of itself possession. The truth is that if you don't possess the asset (due to on-chain execution) you might have to sue to get what is yours, and that doesn't always go well.

This is just wrong. It is perfectly possible to create a soft consensus system that is fully autonomous and as with a fully decentralized blockchain, has no one to sue who could possibly help you in moving on-chain assets contrary to the consensus rules.

I prefer the term embedded consensus as soft consensus implies it is somehow weaker or less secure, which is not the case.

I guess (though I haven't really studied them in detail) we have some half-baked soft consensus-ish systems on Steem that are semi-centralized or even fully centralized and this leaves the impression of soft consensus being far less capable than it actually is.