Thanks, sidelined. I realize, now that I reread it, that I agree with most of your OP. There is no clear dividing line between "living" and "non-living", and no matter how one defines "life" there are going to be problematic examples.
Such is reality. Human categories are often pretty arbitrary, as are the dividing lines. One of the most profound moments I had was I read an essay by S.J. Gould on classifying Archaeopterix as a bird or as a reptile, where he made this exact point.
Still, to understand the world we need to classify things, to make distinctions, to categorize things.
Reductionism is an important tool in our conceptualizing the world; however, the limitations must always be acknowledged. There are often going to be "in-between" cases that don't fit our nice, neat categories easily, and if one takes the reductionist approach too seriously one will fail to really understand the world. And, as new understanding dawns, the old categories may become inadequate, based on the old way of thinking of things. Like the Greeks dividing matter up into fire, water, earth, and air - these categories make no sense whatsoever according to our current understanding of matter.
That's why I suggested that each field will probably have its own definition of life/non-life, either tacit or explicit. Because each field has its own paradigm, its own conception of understanding its subject matter, and needs to categorize the data in a way that makes sense to the reseachers.
Of course, as someone says in this thread, as science advances, and the different fields in abiogenesis begin to merge and reach a common understanding of what it is they are studying, then the definitions will need to be standardized.
Sorry for the rambling pseudo-philosophy. My dissertation is seriously derailed right now, so I've been given to metaphysical musings. Someday I have to write a serious of essays on this stuff.