People claim to be able to see differences in the shade of pink and know the pH, but, yeah, I'm not a true believer either. No chemist worth their pocket protector would think that's a valid idea. So you're in good company!
And, yes, I agree that any soap that really has a true pH of 8.2 is no longer soap -- it's mostly fatty acids. I've been working for awhile on an article about this topic, and got it uploaded to my website a few days ago --
Soap pH | Soapy Stuff
The thing about testing pH is that it has to be done in a dilute solution to get accurate, repeatable answers. If you try to test soap that is too concentrated, the "pH" reading you get is artificially lower than it truly is. Essentially the pH reading is affected by the lack of water because the soap molecules are not free to fully ionize.
Some people, for example, cook their liquid soap paste for hours 'n hours and keep testing it by dropping phenol-p onto a dab of paste until the phenol-p remains colorless. Then and only then is the soap supposedly saponified.
What's really happening is they're cooking so much water out of the paste that the OH- ion concentration (the ions that contribute to a high pH) is artificially very low. If the OH- ion concentration is artificially low, the pH will appear to be considerably lower than it really is.
If this paste would be diluted to a 1% to 10% pure soap content, phenol-p should turn the soap mixture pink just as you'd normally expect. Cooking soap to death doesn't change the essential nature of the soap -- it still remains alkaline (in the 9-11 range), just like soap should be -- but ya gotta do the pH test correctly.
Thanks for the Soap pH link! Heading to read it now!
