While the soft selection floating toolbar from Graphite is a vast improvement on the command panel it is missing one crucial component to make it truly interactive/dynamic. It defeats the purpose of having a visual icon driven method that changes interactively in the viewport if the result isn't updated in real-time in the viewport.
As it is you have to use the tool by trial and error, redoing the translation each time while fiddling with the settings. It makes no sense that the designer would go to this trouble and then leave out the one thing that makes the tool truly interactive and a workflow boost over the command panel.
Blender's Soft Selection counterpart is Proportional Editing. Activated by hotkey and fully dynamically updated in the viewport using the mouse wheel.
