It really baffles me that some formatting engines require that soft-hyphens be pre-inserted. For eBooks, particularly. Apparently Kindle supports hyphenation only if the book has explicit soft-hyphens. Google Books doesn't seem to support it at all. Meanwhile, FBReader does a perfect job of hyphenating arbitrary ePubs. TeX has done it right since what, 1983?

Yes, hyphenation is language-specific, but if your application is laying out blocks of text, a set of hyphenation tables is a basic part of language support.