Not useless. Worse than existing options, sure. Unyielding itself is quite a decent power, only held back by its long recharge time. Provoke is a bad taunt but if your powers are really that tight you can take it instead of taunt if you want unyielding. Fear is crowd control and there's no class in the game that finds that completely useless. Sure, you'd never go out of your way to pick it, but your goal is to pick up Unyielding, which could be quite a big deal for various different builds.
You keep bringing up this recharge issue but I literally said it's something that can be easily tweaked and apparently applied differently to other powers. Could you read my whole post?
Now, I don't understand why adding a feature that is too weak is a reason to remove it altogether. If it's such a bad option, what's the harm in leaving it there? Why not fix the pool and use the design somehow?