Riemann-Hilbert problems are jump problems for holomorphic functions along given interfaces. They arise in various contexts, for example, in the asymptotic study of certain nonlinear partial differential equations and in the asymptotic analysis of orthogonal polynomials. Matrix-valued Riemann-Hilbert problems were considered by Deift et al. in the 1990s with a noncommutative adaptation of the steepest descent method. For orthogonal polynomials on the line or on the circle with respect to exponentially varying weights, this led to a strong asymptotic expansion in the given parameters. For orthogonal polynomials with respect to exponentially varying weights in the plane, the corresponding asymptotics was obtained by Hedenmalm and Wennman (2017), based on the technically involved construction of an invariant foliation for the orthogonality. Planar orthogonal polynomials are characterized in terms of a certain matrix 𝜕-problem (Its, Takhtajan), which we refer to as a soft Riemann-Hilbert problem. Here, we use this perspective to offer a simplified approach based not on foliations but instead on the ad hoc insertion of an algebraic ansatz for the Cauchy potential in the soft Riemann-Hilbert problem. This allows the problem to decompose into a hierarchy of scalar Riemann-Hilbert problems along the interface (the free boundary for a related obstacle problem). Inspired by microlocal analysis, the method allows for control of the solution in such a way that for real-analytic weights, the asymptotics holds in the L² sense with error O(e^{−𝛿√𝑚}). in a fixed neighborhood of the closed exterior of the interface, for some constant 𝛿 > 0, where 𝑚 → +∞. Here, m is the degree of the polynomial, and in terms of pointwise asymptotics, the expansion dominates the error term in the exterior domain and across the interface (by a distance proportional to 𝑚^−1/4). In particular, the zeros of the orthogonal polynomial are located in the interior of the spectral droplet, away from the droplet boundary by a distance at least proportional to 𝑚^−1/4.