Hi Dustin,
Thanks for the suggestion! Here’s the thing with stop words and adjusting WordPress Rewrite (URL structure):
Heavy and unreliable
Adjusting the URL structure is quite a heavy task, and it also seems to be a great source for bugs as many plugins and themes rely on the URL structure.
It could also mean that some URLs will overlap, this also has to be accounted for and we would have to adjust WordPress’ core system.
There are many more things to account for when doing such, and I do not want to adjust WordPress Core and I probably never will. I want to work with the core :).
Google doesn’t care
But more importantly, the reason you’re asking:
Google has stopped caring as much for the URL as it did back in the days. It’s now more about content than anything else.
It also has algorithms for Stopwords and whether or not to include them in the results.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide if the URL is user-friendly or not, a piece of software removing Stopwords automatically might even make it unfriendly.
You can always change the URL through the WordPress interface, although I do not recommend doing so after the post has been available for quite some time (the prior URL will result in a 404).
Sources
The closest source for that Google doesn’t care is I have is in this Youtube Video.
A great read from Moz (related is #8).
And Google’s US Patent 7409383 for determining stop words (acts 703, 803), comparing them in results (acts 708, 808) and how to eventually treat them (acts 709, 809).
I hope this clears things up! Let me know if you have any more requests, I’d love to consider them! ??
