Stealing as Gameplay Extender?

I got into a discussion about Dragon Age: Origins with a friend earlier today and when I told him that I am 70+ hours into one of my characters, he was shocked. It took him about fifty hours to finish the game and he claimed that he did a lot of the side-quests so we started to compare notes in regards to our in-game activities. Of course with a deep game like this, the gameplay mileage will vary between players depending on how involved he or she is in the role-play. The one funny thing that came up during our conversation was my obsession with being a pickpocket in the way of the rogue character Leliana. Every time I enter a new area, I ensure that I pickpocket everyone. Since the ability has a 10-second cooldown, sometimes I do find myself standing still in a populated area waiting for the ability to refresh before proceeding to the next available victims. Pickpocketing is not that profitable of a venture even though it is extremely time consuming but obviously I am addicted to it. Thankfully, I am not obsessive compulsive enough to try to pickpocket again when I go back to the areas that I have visited before - it can only be done once per person anyway - though I sometimes pickpocket a non-player character a couple of times when the ability fails... I wonder if I actually spent hours stealing from people in this game.

Stealing from the poor makes the whole thing a lot more fun!