I like the idea of moving away from the hard/soft delineation and towards a more qualitative description of each skill. The focus on bucketing into just two things distracts from the differences between all of the things.

I also think, as you describe, that it's very valuable when technical folks have at least some baseline of communication skills (not specifying whether that is hard/soft, especially considering that they may need to communicate about very complex topics). I'm not optimistic about anyone being the best at both, but it's not impossible.