In the old Pikmin games your cursor wouldn’t get stuck on enemies and items the way it does in 4. It’s a soft lock since it sticks, but can be removed by moving the stick over enough. Hard lock is when you lock it in yourself with a button press (like Z targeting in the old Zelda games). Without a soft lock, you could more specifically target body parts on creatures (if you wanted to blind a bulborb for example you could aim for its eyes) or in the case I’m encountering if there are multiple enemies you could freely move between them instead of getting stuck on each one as the cursor moves along. You could miss your targets without this feature which is likely why they changed it and the game is largely fine without it except when multiple enemies are present. Like in this challenge I paused on where you have 99 grub enemies.
Oh, I get it now, I call that the auto-aim, because it's a bit too "hard" for me to be called a "soft lock" lol. I think soft lock only activates once you do an action, like in Bayonetta where you won't face the nearest enemy automatically, but once you attack you'll move in its' direction. However in Pikmin 4 you're actually getting locked on even if you don't do anything but move the cursor. Anyway, I do agree that it's horrible.
I’m not sure what you would call the feature you are describing exactly, but in my first post I called it a throw cap. This is another feature that aims to make the game more accessible and it generally is less of a concern considering they largely removed the ability to speed up carrying stuff by throwing more Pikmin at a task, though White Pikmin skirt that rule which is where it comes up as an annoyance.
I think you can still throw more Pikmin to carry things faster. The game will stop tossing Pikmin once it reaches the exact number for a collectible, but if you stop mashing the button and then press it again after a short pause you can continue tossing Pikmin and they'll grab it. I think this is a very good system, because it gives you an easy way to quickly throw the exact number of Pikmin, but it also provides a way to keep throwing more and it's really hard to do by mistake.
Anything that could be carried by 1 Pikmin usually can't have more carrying it, which is true throughout the series, but anything with a slightly higher minimum like 5 should still work the same as a larger object.
Things that can be carried by 1 Pikmin can be carried by 2, it's possible in all the games.
One curious thing about this in Pikmin 1: If you have two Pellet Poseys next to each other and you throw 2 Pikmin at them, they will first hit the flowers to drop both pellets and then they will both grab and carry the same pellet, leaving the other one in the floor. It doesn't even matter if you throw each Pikmin at a separate flower or if both of them start on the same flower, they seem to be programmed to first hit the all nearby flowers and drop all the pellets and then grab them. I guess that the AI sees an "ungrabbed" pellet and assigns both Pikmin to it. So when the first Pikmin gets to it there's still room for one more and the second one grabs it as well. If there's a third Pikmin it will see that there is no more room in that pellet and go for a different one, so if you have 3 flowers, you'll end up with 2 Pikmin carrying one pellet, another one carrying one on his own and an unattended pellet on the floor.
