Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost?
And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility. (Credibility and cultural attraction? Pretty sure these have little correlation. Dictators can make creditable threats.) Further, its a debatable claim that there is a 'core currency' of soft power.
As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill for your personal meaning of Credibility. But I can attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger than any International Relations Realist practitioner would make.
It's a shame we can't have nice things.
There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you just have to be globally consistent