Your breakdown is pretty accurate, but comes off as a little exaggerated. Yeah I'm not gonna be soloing any +4/x8 incarnate content any time soon, but my character has been an absolute blast doing smaller scale solo missions, or when on any competent team as long as I play smart or just pay attention I can really make a difference. The most fun is getting ahead of the tank and hitting a dormant mob with confusion, often proc-ing contagious confusion which helps take aggro off the rest of the team (especially helps if tank isn't amazing or we just don't have one), and PA/spectral terror/phantasm also splits up the aggro quite a bit leaving my invisible self largely unnoticed unless I get sloppy with enemy AoE's. Also flash might be the only AoE hold, but people seem to sleep on how effective spectral terror is on holding down a mob.
Again I don't need to sell it, you make very valid and on-the-nose points, just saying the power combo is not as crap as people might think from your response, as long as you pay attention while playing. Kin is a huge game changer for team buffs and ill is great for adding extra targets to a fray. I was simply asking if people could guide me on how to amp resistance or defense so that I wouldn't get slapped and one-shotted by certain enemy attacks. Especially in incarnate content where there can be SO many enemies that you can't tell where attacks are coming from, a little more survivability is desired but won't ruin the game for me if I just need to stay on my toes for certain encounters.