Vertex Colour Assignment

Been loving Blender for quite a while and am hoping to 1 day completely replace 3dsMax that I've been using since the late 1990's. There's 1 small, seemingly simple thing missing that's been keeping me from ditching 3dsMax and moving to Blender full time.

The ability to assign vertex colour based on mesh soft selection.

With 3dsMax using the vertex paint modifier I can create mesh selections with soft selection fall offs and paint bucket fill that mesh selection with vertex colour to the assigned channel (RBGA). this creates very complex, accurate and smooth localised gradients all over the mesh where I had selections. I use these tools constantly to create many different 'masks' in the vertex colour channels to use as deformation masks in shaders using Unreal.

In Blender as far as I can tell I can only assign a giant gradient across the mesh, use the brush tools to paint manually or very very slowly assign the colours for the soft selection falloff vert by vert as Blender seems to ignore the mesh soft selection falloff and only assigns vertex colour to the physically selected vertices.

None of those options are anywhere near as fast or accurate for assigning the shader deformation vertex colour masks I create with 3dsMax.

In general mesh modelling and selection tools in nearly every 3d package are far far more advanced than the vertex painting tools. Allowing assignment of vertex colour using the mesh selection and its soft selection falloffs for multiple nice smooth gradient fills seems like it would be a small and easy addition to blender and would help me finally shelve 3dsMax and its expensive subscription model permanently :)

thanks