I´m also a long time RPG gamer and I find the sneak-to-find-secrets pretty annoying.
The secrets are there to be found, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered including those. But the mechanics to find them means you have to crawl through the whole game. That's not fun for me and, yes, I want to find them all.
What should happen is, if a character has high enough perception, he should say something vague like "Something's odd here" around an area with a secret, and only then you would need to sneak to find the exact location of the secret. IIRC, I think M&M11 worked like that.