Cloaking also pairs well with shields, since shields can be turned on and off like Active Sensors. Merely mounting them doesn't affect your visibility in any way, but they can be a damn sight more powerful than armor in some cases... especially for those times when you just need to throttle up and get the hell out of Dodge City.
Remember too, that the old "Lol. Just turn off the engines." trick no longer works in C#. If you aren't familiar with it, in VB6 you could just slow down to 0 km/s and become invisible to Thermal Passives. In C# you have a minimum Thermal Signature which is tied to your maximum engine output... 10% of it IIRC. So Thermal Reduction is much, much more essential than it was before.
Even moreso now that both Active and Passive sensors got a buff in C#, so some Deep Space Tracking Station plopped down on some God-Forsaken, air-less hellhole will happily detect your expensive and highly-specialized stealth ship from an in-ordinate distance. Although the NPRs don't abuse this... at least not like players do, so if your not a PvP person don't worry about it as much.