My question; is there a way to soft start the servos, i,e, get them to move to their start position from power up without jumping at full speed?
Not without additional hardware: when you attach the servos, they will immediately try to move at full speed to whatever position you're telling them to go to. You can vary this by setting the position before the attach, but the problem is that you likely don't know what position the servos are in when you power up. You can remedy this with encoders or as a workaround, you can always set the servo positions to known values on shutdown.