During the RF3 development, most players agreed that strafe attack hitting sleeping/unaware monsters was a bad thing for the player.

I guessed that was the reason, but I'd prefer if my strafe attacks did trigger on sleeping/unaware enemies. It doesn't help that an enemy can become aware and attack in the same turn, so sometimes you're strickly worse off because an enemy was 'unaware'.

I think that I'd prefer to hit unaware enemies as well. I find that using a burst of SP to strafe down single enemies is DEX classes version of freeze - it makes it trickier when you need to get aggro first. Sometimes I am strafing and sleep bombing and do want to keep sleeping enemies from attacking, but that seems like a minority of cases.