Currently, when you specify a soft quota, you also set a "grace period" after which the soft quota expires and becomes a hard quota. We wish to have an option to still enable soft quotas but prevent the soft quota from becoming a hard block if the usage is below the hard quota levels. In other words, the user would still be notified the soft quota has been reached, but they wouldn't ever be blocked from writing unless they hit the hard quota limits.

I can envision a couple similar approaches to this: you could have an option that allows an inifinite grace period (e.g. lfs setquota -t -1 ...), or you could have an option that prevents the soft quota from ever becoming a hard quota.