"Instead, we rolled forward by creating a new app, and helping them copy environment and data from the deleted app to it. So even where soft deletion was theore

"Instead, we rolled forward by creating a new app, and helping them copy environment and data from the deleted app to it. So even where soft deletion was theoretically most useful, we still didn’t use it." But... weren't you using all those env and data info from the soft-deleted set? I've typically been using soft-deletes for most projects for years. People have accidentally deleted records, and having a process to undelete them - manually or giving them a screen to review/restore - has usually been great. Yes, if there's a lot of related artefacts not in the database (files/etc) that were literally deleted, you may not be able to get them back. But that's an ever greater edge case in projects I work in as to not be a huge issue. We probably have some files in a backup somewhere, if it's recent. Trying to 'undelete' a record from years ago - yeah, likely ain't gonna happen. People are used to 'undo' and 'undelete'. Soft-deletes are one way to provide that functionality for some projects.