I had some fun with my old Helios 58mm f/2 and my new model (no specifications on the casing :) the other day. And this is the 100% crop of the result... color-passthrough and desaturation were the only operations done on this one. I was blown away by how much sharpness and how vivid colors can this lens produce.
It has fronfocus...But eyelashes are sharp, I'll give you that;).
It is a manual focus lens on a EOS 20D without manual focus focusing screen, so any frontfocus is due to my eye focusing skills...
That was my point hehe. You just need to practise, the lens is sharp (you just showed a bad example for judging sharpness).