dtgreene: In Final Fantasy 5, it took me over 100 tries to get a rare steal off an enemy.
Even with a glitch that allows me to get 99 of the item after a successful steal, that's still less than one bow per steal attempt. (There is another variant that would have given me 255 of the item, but that version only works if the item can be thrown or consumed, and you can't throw bows at enemies.)
Tauto: Well,they say crime doesn't pay:)
Except that I'd be killing that enemy anyway, which would be a more serious crime than simply taking its bow. (Before you ask, no you can't just loot the bow from the dead enemy; Final Fantasy (series) does not work that way.)
Also, in some cases, "crime" *does* pay; for example, in the first world there are some enemies you can easily steal Ethers and Hi-Potions from, both of which are rather handy consumable items.
By the way, in the next game in the series, Final Fantasy 6, it's actualy impossible to beat the game without stealing or major glitches. (For this purpose, a glitch is major if it allows sequence breaking, or involves something like memory corruption or arbitrary code/script execution.)