There is one place that stealth is super helpful, and that is sniping. Your deep gnome can probably kill entire encounters without ever being spotted simply by shooting, pushing the stealth check, re-stealthiness, moving to the next spot. Repeat ad nauseum.
I don't think anyone is questioning if the current implementation of stealth can be powerful... The issue is that it's some gimmicky meta-gaming that exploits a broken implementation.
