Okay I was imprecise; but in WoW/DnD, when a Rogue attacks from behind every attack becomes a sneak attack and gets bonus damage as a result.
Obviously we'd have to adjust the formulas if we made every back attack a sneak attack or it would be imbalanced; which is why Ihina recommended it keep its current bonuses but apply only to WS.
Essentially the idea is that so long as you are behind a mob, every WS you do will have sneak attack bonuses. So long as you are behind a party member, every WS you do will have trick attack bonuses.
This would go a great deal in making us true hate control in ways that Accomplice/Collaborator never could and would help fix PLD's enmity generation issues quite a bit.
Additionally it would force ppl to stop being HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE with positioning.
SA/TA were initially mechanisms for Thief to compensate for low base damage by converting secondary stats into damage. This allowed Thief to be a competitive/premiere DD as the game was initially designed as it generally took a whole cooldown cycle for ANYONE to WS.
However as weapon frequency has increased, SA/TA has stayed the same. SE fixed this at 75 by adding Assassin, allowing us to split the timers to have two stacks per minute instead of one. But nowadays two stacks per minute still holds us back comparative to other DDs who can WS at full strength over 5 times a minute at least. Converting from time based JAs to permanent JTs alleviates this issue.