I'm fairly interested in that topic and wrote a short draft here explaining a few basic reasons to explicitly develop capabilities measuring tools as it would improve risk mitigations. What resonates from your question is that for 'known categories' we could start from what the papers recognise and dig deeper for more fine coarsed (sub-)capabilities.
When I check ArXiv for new AI alignment research papers, I see mostly capabilities research papers, presumably because most researchers are working on capabilities. I wonder if there’s alignment-related value to be extracted from all that capabilities research, and how we might get at it. Is anyone working on this, or does anyone have any good ideas?