Because sometimes, the fame is what you are after. And others, no puppet can fulfill your wishes as well as you could.
If you aim power in a mediocre kingdom, then sure, staying behind the scenes works fine. If you want your realm to totally kick the ass of all the other realms, that's usually not enough.
Probably true for the most part, but I've had some decent success with this in larger realms to. You just have to do it differently for puppets that are easy to control and those that think they are doing what they want. (hardest part is just not having access to ruler's channel, but if they send you all the ruler messages it works fine.)
