Again, you are not saying anything new at all with this wall of text. You can claim any competency you want but that has to be evaluated and judged by the Interviewer's (and his team's) standards. This is the key; since your opinion of yourself does not count for that much, you provide all the info. you can to the Interviewer so they can pick up on it and dig deeper on all aspects (coding, designing, requirements specification, system architecture etc.) as needed.

Also a lot of words/phrases you have used above are general platitudes. By themselves they mean nothing unless you can tie them to a specific usecase/experience from your CV which should contain the details. Both the "Forest" i.e. big picture/business need/overall system/architecture/etc. details and "The Trees" i.e. languages/tools/libraries/frameworks/techniques/etc. matter.

You have to deal with Reality even if it is broken but you can do it differently than the norm (but stand out on the positive side) and get excellent results. To paraphrase a wellknown saying; "It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick [recruiting process]".

> The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. ... But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.

This depends on what i am interviewing you for. As pointed out above, my requirements/needs trump your view/opinions of the role.

As an example, my very first job was implementing a Personnel Information System using Cobol85 on a Cyberdata mainframe. Using Structured Analysis and Design methods (this was before OO became mainstream) I implemented a RDBMS inspired design using ISAM files and also a UI using ansi escape codes. So even though i do not remember much of the Cobol language itself i remember the design which is still useful today. Hence i can demonstrate knowledge of Relational Theory/RDBMSes as needed. This is only possible if it were listed in the CV in the first place.

> Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”.

You have failed the test. This only shows you have no business evaluating any resume for a C++ developer. It is actually an advanced expertise which most good interviewers understand and appreciate and design teams need.