I tried hunting a bit but either I just suck at it or I don't get the mechanics for it. From what I could tell your results seem to depend on you randomly picking the "correct" option for how to do the hunt without any clue as to what that option might be. Needless to say I almost always choose the wrong option. I think you might be right about the stealth thing though so it could still be worth doing if it means you randomly increase some stealth sometimes. It's also good for food production if you're low on food and don't want to pay famine prices or something.I recall reading that you can get Stealth from hunting these days but I've not actually tried it as I've been working on other things. I might do that next as I finish off this character and get that last Blacksmithing point. I've still not picked a religion, married or done much of anything with the factions outside build my own little force out at Fort Sera so there's still things to do with this character I've now played for 1703 days. Reading your posts makes me want to restart though, I've been playing this same guy for almost seven months.
I'll keep your Valkria strategy in mind for a restart though, that sounds like a very good way to handle the Arena in the very beginning. I too go for the auto-wins almost exclusively, the one exception being when my Tier-2 slave was able to beat Dark Pearl and Raven almost every time with fists and I'd take a chance on that most the time.
For a while I tried putting a girl who was inept in the Arena solely to train her up a little and would just pop in when doing my own Arena battles to 'encourage' her and fight one of those easy battles. The theory was it was like sending them to the Academy but wasn't taking up a slot in my own household. I pulled her eventually out of frustration with her inability to auto-win easy ones, but thinking about it again perhaps it wasn't that bad an idea.
Fishing seemed completely pointless to me. I tried that and usually got literally nothing from it.
One other tidbit regarding the arena that I've only recently discovered is that the dice roll that happens for the slave arena fight just before the actual fight seems to have results that are influenced by how hard of a fight it is for that slave. If it's hard enough that she can lose some of the time then that random dice check can occasionally lead to random stat losses. But from what I can tell, if she's guaranteed to win the actual fight then that dice check just before the fight can ONLY give a good result. You never randomly lose stats from it.
I might try training Rebecca's melee up a bit in this game since this time she actually has 3 combat relevant perks (tough, malevolent, and warrioress). I would think theoretically that means she should be able to beat the results of a slave who only has tough and warrioress (which is what my valkrie always seems to start with) if her melee was higher. I still won't want her in the arena long term but she might be an option to swap in temporarily to train up valkrie a bit before I get Aria and before I'm ready to work on getting Skulduggery unlocked.