That is the thing as Tim and Ewan keep pointing out ; Marc, or whoever
put SOC in the game, understood class antagonism - which is rare for
an American, but I've also noticed that a lot of Vietnam vets seem to
have picked that up during their time over there (being right up
against the Good Old Boys club might've helped, along with seeing the
class antagonism between the French colonial personnel, the local
collaborators, American military, and everybody else). For more modern
American gamers, where social class is fairly aggressively ignored,
the underlying logic can be very hard to grasp - our culture demands
the ignoring of class (see the way every billionaire tries to portray
themselves as a hard working everyman), Social Status directly implies
Social Class, and that clashes with the baseline cultural assumptions
players bring to the game.

For a game that comes more in-line in modern American sensibilities
(and also demands a stat modifier for every skill roll), Status can be
somewhat sidelined to a piece of information that informs roleplay
(you always carry your childhood with you), and effectively replaced
with what people treat it as - ability to socially interact (convince
others and quickly learn the unspoken social rules of a group).