The thing that bothers me the most with all of the uproar about this scene is that people keep saying, well, this was unnecessary from a story standpoint, that it didn't need to happen.

Well, yes, in the sense that authors have control over their story and can do whatever they want, yes it didn't need to happen. But by that same token, NONE of this story is necessary. It's not necessary for Cersei to be horrible at running a kingdom, it's not necessary for Tyrion to have too large of a cock to tell that it belongs to a dwarf, etc...

Things like this rape are in the story because storytelling is not about manipulating a plot to satisfy your readers/viewers, it is (at least in the case of game of thrones, not all authors write this way) an organic extension of the characters who, while being fictional, behave in internally consistent ways. Game of Thrones is set in a medieval-type world, there is no compelling character reason why Ramsey would ever have not raped Sansa. There are no realistic, logical scenarios in which this could have been avoided once Sansa started heading to Winterfell. Yes, you can make a decent argument that she never should have gone there in the first place, and I do somewhat question Petyr Baelish's thought process in all of this, but it's not out of character for him to send Sansa to Winterfell, nor is it out of character for her to choose to go.

So, the point I'm making is that all of these characters acted in a way that was entirely consistent with their characters and with the world they lived in. Was it unpleasant and disturbing? Yes. But was it unnecessary? No, in fact it was entirely inevitable based on what this show and book series is.