There's nothing wrong with the current system. There are standard stencil shadows and the non-stencil kind. A new kind of stencil shadow was recently implemented that eliminates some of the errors with the older style, however at the cost of speed. Most modern or semi-modern engines have one or the other or both and most games(including AAA) have used these kinds of shadows in the past and continue to today. The other engines' versions aren't any different from these unless they're a style that 3DGS doesn't support.

Soft shadows are achieved via shaders and you can either buy the Sphere plugin now or wait until they are implemented in the template shaders collection(see Forecast).