This may be an issue of not understanding all the options and how best to get the trace you want. Redirecting... Your task may require multiple traces of the same image, changing the settings each time to capture the desired sections. Would need to see an example to offer suggestions for your exact case, but here I use ‘Trace Image’, then remove some resulting traced elements, to isolate the outline of a dog to use as a mask.
I take, “It hardly ever provides a usable result, the best you can hope for is something that won’t take longer to fix than create from scratch.” as a challenge. I accept! 
So, what artwork are you trying to trace (share example), what settings did you try, and what results are you getting?