That's been my experience as well. The "lowest" setting is also extremely slow, so like others mentioned I would only use ascending or descending. I honestly thought the crawl control was a gimmicky feature for people who were nervous when off-roading, but ever since I saw that promo video of Toyota showing it off in the new Tacoma to get unstuck from deep sand, I realized there is actually some functionality to it. 90% of my wheeling is dry hard ground, which I guess is why I never really saw any benefit before.
i just saw the video of it...impressive!! glad to have it on the 4runner.