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In some other donation management software, it's possible to say, e.g., "I'm giving $100 in memory of my grandfather. I want my mother and uncle to be acknowledged."
Has anyone tried to incorporate such a workflow into CiviCRM? How do you best do it? Do you soft credit my grandmother? Or my mother/uncle? How do you generate reports of who needs acknowledging?
It depends a bit on the purpose of gathering soft credits and acknowledging the donation. For acknowledgement purposes it may be sufficient to gather email and name (and perhaps address) on a front or backend form and with a hook send off an acknowledgement email. I think this can be very nice for those related to the honoured person, allowing them to send a thank you card if they want. Personally I won't bother creating additional soft credits for the mother and uncle beyond those for the person in honour/memory of.
I recalled that my former coworker wrote an "acknowledgee" extension to handle a similar situation and put it on my Github. You can find it here: https://github.com/MegaphoneJon/org.ccr.acknowledgee.
It's rough around the edges, but a) it adds a set of fields to the contribution page if "in memory of" is selected; b) if you have a contribution custom field "Acknowledgee" of type "Contact Reference", it will populate that field with the contact ID that is created/updated.