Why is an academic CV not the place to sell?
In academia, the traditional CV format is exactly what people care about, i.e. it already is the sell. Other academics care about stuff like your papers, presentations, and teaching experiences. In general, very little weight is given to the other topics that you mentioned, so including them is a waste of space. The few places that they do have weight (primarily graduate admissions), the relevant parts are better suited to other areas of the application (e.g. official transcripts, TOEFL and GRE score reports) where they are more likely to be seen when needed.

Note that graduate admissions are slightly different from the rest of academia. CVs that are submitted here are often more of a hybrid between traditional resumes and academic CVs, in large part because prospective graduate students don't have the academic experiences and achievements to fill up the latter (somewhat field-dependent). But many of the same cultural norms apply. By and large, academics are not interested or swayed by unverifiable "fluff," so you should limit what you include to specific, concrete, verifiable achievements.