-I happen to like cloth and I use it a lot, More so the differences are in setup and final look- for anything that is supposed to be fabric etc, it looks ten times better in cloth than soft. With cloth you have to think ahead, and set up your animation to accomodate cloth- I've even simulated my character having a tug-o-war using a cloth rope- just to give you an idea... Soft bodies don't require half the setup time but they don't make good cloth like motion - which comes down to how the material is tesselated, a true cloth garment has a completely random tesselation pattern making it able to bend, move, crease quite realistically. Where as when you create soft bodies your at the mursy of the tesselation pattern of that object originally, which is usually blocky in look/ squared...
-and to answere the previouse post you can add dynamic field to cloth by using a cloth field constraint in the cloth menu set, all you do is select all or just the area of vertices on the cloth you want to affect apply the constraint add in your field connect it and go... NOTE: when using cloth field constraints you have to jack the megnatudes up really high sometimes like 10000 to 50000... This is not a bug or a mistake it has to do with the fact that all the dynamic field in maya where created before maya cloth existed and where set to work with soft and rigid bodies...
-good luck
sid
sid69graphic@yahoo.com