Scene: pemerton's house
Child: Dad, can I have a cookie?
Dad pemerton: You can have a cookie, son. You may have the cookie you've been staring at intently.
<child goes and gets a cookie from the cookie jar>
Dad pemerton: What are you doing?! I didn't say "yes"!
Huh? The child said "Can I have a cookie" and I replied "You can have a cookie". That is an unambiguous affirmative reply.
The Sage was asked "Can a wood elf hide while observed" and the answer is "S/he can hide while observers are nearby, and even if eyes are staring directly at the elf." As I said upthread, if by this the Sage intended
s/he can hide while observed and even while stared at, he chose an extremely obtuse form of words.
the November 2015 Sage Advice <snippage> maintains the ambiguity found in the rules
I agree. It says neither "no" nor "yes", and recapitulates much the same sort of ambiguous or imprecise language as provokes the quetsion in the first place. Jeremy Crawford is clearly a clever person who is capable of being clear if he wants to be. From which I infer that he
chose to maintain the ambiguities and lack of precision.
until you take an action to make a Stealth check to hide, you are not unseen and unheard, you are just lightly obscured, and thus still visible.
Your way of treating it would run contrary to the rules. If the elf steps out into a snow storm, he is not enjoying the benefit of being hidden until it actually take the Hide action and make a Stealth check, which is after he get out
As I said upthread, this is taking the action economy too literally for my taste.
I don't envisage the action economy as a model of a stop-motion world. I envisage it as a device for resolving actions that, in the world of the fiction, are unfolding as fluidly as things do in real life.
In real life a person can step out of his/her front door stealthily. There need be no moment where the person is (i) outside the door, yet (ii) not hidden. I don't see why an elf in D&D can't perform this same feat. Especially in 5e, which permits breaking up the movement on either side of the declaration and resolution of the DEX check.
Both a human and an elf or halfling go from hearable to unheard when sucessfully hiding so i don't really see your point about this?
My point is that vision and sound don't work the same way. I can choose (within limits) to be silent. I can't choose to be invisble.
I am assuming that the elf can't choose to be (literally) invisible either, even in falling snow. So saying that the elf "blinks off the radar" in the same way a human does who hides in darkness is not helpful. In the case of the human in the darkness, what makes him/her unable to be seen is the absence of light. What makes the elf unable to be seen (assuming s/he is not invisible)? I assume that it is some sort of "blending in" with the natural phenomena -
camouflage in the broad sense that you used it upthread.
Can this be done while actually under observation from a person watching you? My feeling is that it can't.