The man speaks the truth, stepping is awful. Your movement should mainly be actions followed by NDing those actions early or right afterwards anyway. Stepping won't even prevent you from getting hit by melee, whereas boosting can easily with most mechs.
On a separate note, Crimson: how do you feel about the differences between the Ez8 and the RX-79 ground type. Differences as far as I can tell are Ez8 has beam instead of machine gun in mode 1, a seemingly bad machine gun burst ability, different assist, and the ability to reload at any point instead of the bazooza in mode 2. I can't really decide which is better though...manual reloading is a godsend in mode 2 but I also really like the bazooka's tracking.