So yes, I agree that barrels teleported through pockets is cheese and Minthara exploding with no response is not good, but those exploits are less easy to discover, so they aren't as big a deal to the game as this stealth problem. This is literally a game breaking issue.
I agree that the game’s handling of stealth is particularly egregious, but for me it’s the elements that affect you even when you are not trying to exploit the mechanics that I find really annoying. I’m generally okay with just not doing things that I think are silly, such as trying to hide my armoured paladin right next to an enemy, but it’s entirely reasonable to want to try to do some things stealthily - as you say it’s an RPG staple - so the fact that the game doesn’t handle it well means that trying to avoid cheese means cutting ourselves off from potentially clever and fun ways to do things.
For example, I hardly ever try to sneak up on enemies and enter battle with any of my characters stealthed any more, because too often the enemies don’t spot my characters and I can just keep attacking without combat triggering, getting an unreasonable advantage that I don’t want. Well, when the enemies don’t spot one of my characters, that character gets unlucky with initiative, and then takes an unwarranted hammering before I can bring the rest of my party in! But my point is that sneaking up and surprising the enemy is something I’d like to be able to do, but feel I can’t because of the way the game currently works.
