Looking to remove the Sales Stage from an Opportunity Page Layout.

I've found the system Sales Stage in CRMOD does not allow you to cascade with another field.  I have set up a custom Sales Stage value which is cascaded with an Opportunity Status.  Unfortunately, I now have two Sales Stage fields on my page layout and I cannot remove the system value as it's always considered required.  I have workflows set up in the background which keep these two fields in synch.

Does anyone know how to remove the system Opportunity Stage field from the screen?  I'm willing to use Javascript, web applets, or any other suggestion people may be aware of.