The real power of improving your initiative is passing the threshold of double your opponent's initiative. Once you move twice every time time the enemy moves once you can kite, you can alternate between attacking and defending, there are lots of tactical opportunities.
In general, going into a battle with 24 initiative instead of 22 is worthless though, you need to add in a weapon of +4 init, a warg, and a haste spell to really get going.
But at the same time, you're taking very small increments in initiative over completely new skills, important improvements in spell resistance, added spells, and larger, cumulative increments in experience (and no, I don't like their presence, but they're in the game). I'm not arguing with your point of view--obviously, every person has to make such decisions for themselves. But speaking only for myself, it still seems to me like a poor tradeoff when haste, a mount, and a weapon with a good initiative will do so much on their own, while leaving all those other traits available to your champion.
