Well radio is inherently unreliable, so assuming you have mechanisms to counter that (like retries) there doesn't seem much point IMO in over-engineering an EDC mechanism, just as long as you can reliably detect a corrupted packet (either by no packet being received, or a packet content based CRC if one happens to get through with multiple bit errors). Also data whitening will scramble the transmitted data, so a single bit error in that will result in a multiple cascade of bit errors when de-whitened. People do try to keep the number if bytes transmitted to a minimum though especially in battery operated systems. There's the issue of variable packet lengths too, if you turn CRC off you might get a corrupted packet length byte.
Pesronally I think the combination of sync word filtering, data whitening, CRC16 of the radio and some parameter checking of the content of the packet is sufficient to detect a missed packet or an errored packet, and then the retry mechanism kicks in.
Mark.