Why is V constantly benched?

[zimmerwald1915]

As to V, the only thing V has done which actually HINDERED the OOTS was kill the draketooths. That's it.

Some "it". Killing the Draketooths led directly to V isolating herself from the party and being unable to help fend off the Linear Guild, to Belkar's incapacitation, and to Durkon's death and vampirization. She is proximately responsible for all the practical diffidulty and emotional suffering the Order has endured since entering Girard's pyramid.

Everything else zimmerwald1915 keeps saying makes V a 'liability' is V being of minimal help. In order for V to be "more a liability than an asset", then killing the draketooths would need to have caused more harm than everything else V has ever done. Including preventing multiple TPKs (yes, including the adult black dragon), the stuff in the battle for Azure city, killing a CR 20 devil that probably would have TPKed the order AND possibly Hinjo...
yea, sorry, I'm not seeing it.

The dragon incident's been discussed, but not from this angle. Would it have been a TPK but for V? I don't think so. Things didn't look good for Haley, certainly, but Roy, Durkon, and Belkar could have carried the day and recovered enough of Haley to resurrect - no doubt plundering the dragon's hoard for the diamonds like the murderhoboes they are. So V saved the Order in that encounter about 5000 gp and some emotional anguish.

V barely affected the course of the battle. The elementals would have been defeated eventually, and any further damage would have been gratuitous; they did what they needed to do. Any soldiers, giant or not, would have been reaped by the Death Knight at about the same time. The dragon head would have fallen on it at the same time regardless of V's presence. V did help Elan keep the refugees from getting slaughtered, so let's give her credit for saving 200 out of 400 lives.

The devil's easy. Its orders were to make "all mortals on the island dead". It clearly wanted to be elsewhere, carrying out more important tasks, so it can be stated with some confidence that it would leave once all the mortals were off theisland. Hinjo and company could have run, and probably would have eventually (and while I can't prove this, I believe it was V, an XP hound at that point in the story, that convinced them to stay and buff instead of running, or forced their hand by just starting to buff herself without consulting the rest of them). Again, V accomplishes nothing beyond maybe saving a few thousand gp worth of diamonds. Let's be generous and say 15,000 gp and some pain and anguish.

To recap, but for V the Order would be something like 20,000 gp richer, and while the first few books would have been darker, the last two would have been much lighter. My feeling is that what the Order have suffered in this book thanks to V's actions far outweighs the suffering they avoided thanks to V in earlier books.