Theft in this game is annoying. It's annoying because once you learn how to circumvent inspections (most of the time unless they decide to notice the stolen goods you might have from elsewhere), it's just extra busywork.
All you have to do most of the time is steal everything you want and then either:
1. Warp the person who just stole everything away to another location and then allow your group to be inspected. "Oh, looks like I was mistaken, my bad". Sometimes they'll notice other stolen items, but this is rarer, and usually persuasion or a bribe will work.
2. Instead of warping the thief, drop everything you just stole onto the ground. Hell, it can even be right in front of the person you just stole from. As long as their stolen goods aren't in your inventory, they don't care.
To give a sort of comparison: Stealing in DOS2 is like paying a prostitute for sex and never get any.
Not quite. In this game you can almost always keep what you took, you just have to jump through hoops to do it. Also, if they actually had brothels in this game, and the prostitutes refused sex after taking payment, I'm sure there would be a way to get what you're after despite that. Hell, you would probably be able to put the prostitute into a barrel and then put that barrel into your inventory for a nice "picnic" in the woods.