Stance comes from the idea of a miss being just that: a flat-out miss. To wit, an attack or shot that accomplishes nothing useful toward ending the combat.
When is a miss not a miss? When it does something useful.
It's the same flawed and IMO very poor logic that lurks behind the concept of "fail forward", where the intent is to turn what should be a flat-out failure into some sort of mitigated success. From where I stand, you can't have a mitigated success without first achieving the success threshold. Same goes for damage in combat: you can't do it until you achieve the "hit" threshold.
Thus, if you want there to be a range where damage dealt is minimal because the hit is marginal (an idea I can get behind in principle), that range should be the first few die pips above the to-hit threshold. So, if the AC is 15 you'd miss outright on 14 or less, do but 1-2 points damage on, say, 15-17, and normal damage on rolls above that.