Assuming this was the reasoning at Larian's, it would still be misguided and bad design. (I mean, they supposed care about player agency, right ?)
The changes from
no Group Stealth functionality, to
Group Stealth button : switches the Stealth state of all characters in the group (Stand <-> Stealth), to
Group Stealth button : switches all Standing characters to Stealth ; no Group Stand functionality, to (hopefully, in a couple of months)
Group Stealth button : brings all characters in the group to the same Stealth state (allowing to apply Stealth All and Stand All)
is really not impressive.
Even if the task of implementing Group Stealth was assigned to a developer who didn't want to work on that, they would have been sooner finished by simply doing it right from the start. It's not even as if it requires much thought/design : text editors already do something similar, just copy the way it works and be done with it.
I wonder if it's too generous to say that UI-and-usability feels like the 5th wheel with Larian.
