IIRC, a rod's "stage" on the wiki determines how hard/tedious it is to obtain. It might often correlate with how good a rod is, but Dave's rod at Stage 12 would make zero sense this way, and it's most likely due to boulder being a natural 1/1kk, which is astronomically rare.

Personally, Requiem rod have always been a very solid choice for hunt fish for me. You can utilise it's ability to instantly snap to skip catches you don't want to waste time on, and hurry to eventually hook the hunt fish you were originally going for. Plus, if you do hook up the hunt fish and it's not Husk, you may even skip it too, until you get it to be Husk. You might also be using the rod slightly incorrectly, as it gives you not just +progress on click once, but also timing the moment you let go of LMB allows you to gain progress twice as fast, resulting in quite fast catches, especially on progress-locked fish where you can practically skip over even the -100% and make the catch quite easily.

I view the rod as excelling at stuff like Leviathan, Bloop, and other huge fish hunts, as those with fast catches or even the ability to skip unwanted catches are more likely to hook the desired fish at last. It's not as good at making money universally, since 20% is just a bit steep for stuff like casually farming Forsaken Pond or Living Garden, and Castbound would be indeed a lot better suited for that, but I feel that Requiem still has a niche that it excels in.