  Descent extensions of the soft-wall model are used to accommodate two
variants of Regge trajectories of vector meson excitations. At non-zero
temperatures, various options for either sequential or instantaneous
disappearance of vector mesons as normalisable modes are found, thus emulating
deconfinement at a certain temperature in the order of the (pseudo-) critical
temperature of QCD. The crucial role of the blackness function, which steers
the thermodynamic properties of the considered system, is highlighted.
