There are two types of draft one is called draft and the other is called draft body.
To use draft body you don't need to divide the faces and for cases that it is suited to it certainly works as advertised. It works by adding material onto the parting line and holding the shape at the top and/or bottom profiles. If you want to learn about it start with a simple block as your example and use the documentation to get an idea about how it works.
When drafting to a parting plane most molded parts that I have dealt with in industry are designed to hold their shape at the parting line and taper material by removing it from the sides of the solid above and below that line. The techniques described for using the other Draft function work with that perfectly well, but it will not divide the faces for you.
The other thing you write about that may occur when you refer to drafting to a parting plane, is that provided you use essentially the same plane to draft to and divide the faces I'm guessing that you simplify the selection process and make things easier. If that guess is similar to the cases you're referring to then by all means I see no harm in continuing to use it, but in terms of describing a method that can be used in all cases I didn't refer to it this as it may just be a common coincidence. The result in cases of stepped parting lines is mismatched unlike anything I'd ever want to use and it doesn't save me any clicks in applying it.
For your stepped parting line again I think that the main problem that I can see right off is that your the steps are too vertical such that the geometry through the stepped section has no shut face for the draft to work with. You may be getting errors. So I attached an image with 10 degrees draft along the Z+ and Z- axis on either side of a stepped parting line. You can see the resulting faces red and green above and below the parting line that used sketch curves on the side of a 100mm square block. The sequence was block, sketch, divide face, draft, draft. You have to apply the two drafts in different directions separately.
Cheers
Hudson