While thieving is annoying I think it can be improved instead of removed.
No risk. Thieves are in their Vault PJs, but they can steal your assault rifle.
Know he's a thief? Tough shit. You can't do anything until the guards spot him, even if you know he's about to/already has robbed you.
Thief Alt! The associated reputation drops mean that you create a character specifically for thievery. Then you either use it to supply your main or you just use it to irritate the fuck out of people.
LOL I TROL U It irritates the hell out of players, new and old alike.
1. Allow unprotection to stay depending on time, rather than death of the thief. (say 30min-1hr)
2. Upcoming engine changes will implement darkness levels, hence I believe stealing should take a huge penalty in daylight/lit locations. This will encourage thieves to prowl at night, rather than steal in broad daylight, as well as stay away from stores.
3. With the soon to be 3D era, we can have a costume that burglars wear (can be just a black outfit), that would be a requirement for a thief to steal (or at least steal from players). So a thief would need to put in time/caps into the outfit before he can steal your precious assault rifle. (Hence now thieves have a risk, since the outfit would drop upon death)
4. Thieves are currently a one way build (similar to a crafter, which are getting reworked with the coming update), the same can apply to thieves. In general if you want a skill to be useful, it has to be useful in PvP, or it is then more efficient to create an alt (crafter, taxi, lock picker, etc.) or left unused (speech, gambling). I propose Stealing to work similar to UO's Wrestling in PvP, but that might be a bit of an extreme suggestion seeing the negativity to thieving in this topic. [This is actually a reworking of the skill, rather than a limitation.]
We can of course impose more restrictions on stealing but what I proposed would be sufficient.