Making it so you don't have to hostile for Pickpocket is something I don't see going well. For one, stealing from players should be difficult. It's doable in it's current state, but really not worth it. The reward is never really going to be worth the risk there, considering people are almost certain to corpse hide you for an offense against their personal property. As someone who's extensively stolen from players, I can say they take it more seriously than character death in most cases since items are harder to replace than just getting raised.
Also, not having them hostile means that when they catch you, they have to hostile you from the radial/player list/quickslotted ability before attacking you back. That's way unfair to the victim here.
As far as the whole pickpocketing NPCs thing, I had stopped doing it long before the nerf came across so I definitely don't do it now. But Emptyanima and I were discussing it just the other day and I believe she told me that in a full run of every NPC in the entire noble's district, she made 150gp and most items sold for 1-3gp each. Perhaps she can shed more light on that. Maybe sometime I'll take a PC with pickpocket and screenshot exactly what I get and how much it sells for so we can have some hard proof for the non-believers.
Though I think it should remain useless unless there's some kind of OCR bump (or other punishment) for failure. That was always my biggest problem with the old method. Not that it was easy money- that it was easy money and failure had zero concequences. If you got an OCR bump on failure, even of just 1 point that stacks, that would have ruled out like 80% of the people who were doing it. Or they'd just be perma-hostile in Barovia, which is balance in itself to me.
