Soft/Weak/Phantom are all useful under particular circumstances. All are specialized things that you might only use once or twice in a whole career, but they need language-level support because they're integrated with the GC. Other languages may not have them but that reflects poorly on them if so. It's similar to how Java GC has a lot of tweakable parameters, which seems like a bad thing until you realise that you need those options just as badly in other languages, it's just that you don't have them.

Final reference is a wart that probably wouldn't be there if the language were designed today. But again, being source and binary compatible with code from 1995 is one of Java's greatest strengths.