Wow... Mike D ain't a WSO-hater. I, sir, am impressed.
Not a WSO hater in the least. In the A-10, we didn't think of the concept of needing a WSO because at the time I flew it, the most advanced thing we used was the AGM-65, and it was fairly easy to use. Everything else was dumb bombs and gun, easy enough for a single pilot.
In the highly-automated partial-glass F-117A, the Sensor Display system for Nav/Attack is one SA-sucking piece of equipment. When training stateside, I'd regularly be on autopilot (required to be) during the 5 minute final attack runs, and being single-pilot, Id have to have my head buried in the display to find and refine my target for the bomb run, including tracking the weapon to the target. All with F-117A hurtling along at .90M and changing altitudes on it's own in a block with no Mk1 eyeballs scanning anything outside on a VMC day/night for traffic, etc. Granted, most of the time I was in Class A, but not always. A mission necessity, but I consider myself lucky not to have had a near-miss at least, much less a midair, during all the times I did those missions in 3 yrs of flying the thing. Especially during the times when our simulated targets were located in Terminal Areas, such as ABQ, ELP, PHX, or TUS.
God help you if you had to go into manual attack. Most guys didn't train for it (most of our guys came from the F-15C community anyway, so they were newbies to air-ground anyway), so most guys didn't do it. Me and a handful of A-10 guys we had there played around with manually flying while doing all of the above, and you damn near needed 4 arms to do it, with al the juggling going on between flying the wobbly jet and managing the target search/track/lock and weapon release. We had a standby pipper, and most people only brought it up in the HUD to remind them when they were cross feeding fuel.
So yes, if there was one plane that seriously needed a WSO, it was the F-117. Our Wing only had one Navigator-rated guy assigned to the entire Wing, and he worked in combat plans as an EWO.