While I see the OP's point, i believe it is too much of a generalization not applicable to all cases. Stop order is a very important feature and trading and has saved me a couple of times already. The thing is you really need to learn how to use and know when and at what price to place stop orders. Generally if you are a newbie doing guesswork with trading, stay away from stop orders.
No, no way. Tell me just *1* advantage of a stop order over a stop limit. You'd just set your limit to zero, and a stop limit would become a classic stop (yeah sure, limit orders are normally scheduled after market, but at zero it would just mean market. The thing is that if there are that many market orders in a chain reaction, the last thing you want is to be the last of them and still be forced to sell).
But please don't tell me you would ever set your limit to zero, you would not. You would probably set it to 50%, 30% at worst. You well know that nothing drops 70% instantly without recovering at least a little, seconds later. And 70%, anyway, isn't a "stop loss", it's just a loss.