So are we saying that the ONLY reason for softlimits is to prevent the machine traversing beyond the home switches and crashing into endstops ( and I guess killing the traverse if we try to go beyond the positive limit, regardless of whether switches are fitted there) . in which case it seems to make sense to have a soft limit of zero and maybe an arbitrary back-off of say 5 , (and I guess that wound be +5 to bring it back within the working area)

So then I guess that I choose an offset in my G code routine to bring the tool to a new start position on my workpiece , Is that so ?