We need good soft-shadows and lighting(and wieghted vertex animation) to be able do more realistic looking worlds and characters, so the engine and our games look up-to-date visually.

Like it or not our customers' visual expectations are driven forward by the big commercial games. Farcry was 3 years ago now and pretty much all other indie engines offer soft-shadows already or are implementing them soon, 3DGS needs to keep up with the market.

Soft-shadows are a different technique from stencils and do not have the camera volume problems. Links to several papers describing methods to do soft-shadows with good performance were already posted on here, including a patented technique that can be licensed very cheaply, so it is wrong to assume soft-shadows must be slow or poor.

Sphere 2.0 has very nice soft shadows, but doesn't suit all projects as you lose out on the perfomance gains from A6/A7's native culling methods, the option to have pre-calculated light mapping as well in your scenes and you also lose the other light management features added for A7.

Having pre-calculated light mapping will remain important for visual quality and performance, especially on lower end hardware but even at the high-end too, take a look at Gears of War.