Spontaneous Raman scattering limits stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) and its CD shortcut (STIRSAP) as atom-optics elements. We treat the lossy three-level $\Lambda$ system with and without adiabatic elimination of the excited state. In the instantaneous dark-bright-excited basis, the no-jump generator is exact and simple: only the bright amplitude feeds the excited state, and a single residual source ($F=\dot{\theta }-{\Omega }_a/2+i\delta sin\theta cos\theta$) couples dark to bright. At the known counterdiabatic (CD) point ${\Omega }_a=2\dot{\theta }$ on two-photon resonance, the generator block-diagonalizes and primary scattering vanishes identically for arbitrary detuning, Rabi frequency, linewidth, and pulse duration, provided the CD coupling is itself scattering-free; otherwise it is $4\Gamma \int |F{|}^2/{\Omega }^{2}dt$ in the local Raman limit. For decay channels that remove scattered atoms from the addressed coherent momentum manifold, the no-jump description gives the coherent-mode observables exactly, as we confirm against Lindblad solutions with and without recycling. The quadrature structure of $F$ suggests a velocity-selective two-quadrature "source nulling"; a controlled comparison shows that it matches a frequency chirp only for selected classes well below the bright-state gap ($|\mu |={\Omega }^2/4\Delta$) and degrades near it, because robustness is set by the residual Hamiltonian perturbation, not the residual source; the chirp remains the practical method. Benchmarking Raman $\pi$ pulses, STIRAP, and optically implemented shortcuts at equal peak power and duration, dark-state transfer scatters less than an optimally detuned $\pi$ pulse only by a shape-dependent factor of order unity ($1.3$-$2.4$ here); its main advantage, already present for bare STIRAP, is tolerance of amplitude errors. At fixed duration an optical shortcut scatters no less than STIRAP; its benefit is to hold the scattering-limited $1/T_p$ error for pulses a few times shorter, or detunings about twice as large, than bare STIRAP tolerates, at up to twice the intensity, while a separate auxiliary Raman pair scatters as much as a $\pi$ pulse at its detuning.