Hello Wayne,
Sorry for the slow reply. First off, I recommend upgrading to the latest NR.
We removed this feature due to the fact that we now support working on tasks from multiple jobs at the same time. Before, it could only work on one job at a time, which is why the job stealing feature was introduced to get that single job done as fast as possible.
The tasks are completed as fast as possible.
The way this works, by way of an example, is that if you have two jobs with, say, 10 rendering tasks each and 2 connected slaves. They each get tasks from "the top" of the queue each time. When all the first 10 tasks have been dispatched (and not necessarily completed yet), it will automatically start giving tasks of the second job to any ready slaves.
I hope this illuminates why we don't have the job stealing feature anymore.
Thanks!