I think a lot of people will be using the new horizontal and vertical step widgets as left/right and up/down buttons.
In these cases, having the step counter in the top corner doesn’t make any sense (e.g. steering a radio controlled car where the widget is being used essentially as two buttons and ‘send step’ is used instead of its value).
It would be great to have a switch where the visible counter could just be switched off to avoid confusion.
For those purposes I’d rather have a resizable d-pad 
Sending values
Up 0
Down 1
Left 2
Right 3
I’d definitely like to see a d-pad as well, but I’m working on a project at the moment where I only need the vertical control, and there will be cases where just the horizontal control is needed too.
Plus removing the visible counter has got to be an easy fix!
I agree 
Knowing my programming it should simply be a tickbox in its settings
that turns the labels visibility on/off
d-pad is in todo list. For the stepper - we’ll check.