The installer may still not have softupdates on, but the installer is very very conservative about defaults, and probably hasn't changed since, well ever. However, from the handbook http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/disks.html#SAFE-SOFT...
"9.4. Which partitions can safely use Soft Updates? I have heard that Soft Updates on / can cause problems.
Short answer: you can usually use Soft Updates safely on all partitions.
Long answer: There used to be some concern over using Soft Updates on the root partition. ..."
