It is just me or Scorch is a beyond abysmal rune?

This rune does a bit of extra early game damage. 20 extra damage at level 1 isn't too bad, and can actually be good if you plan to cheese them early.

The problem? This rune falls off very hard and early. It only scales to 60 damage, and even then it only does that at level 18. This rune has no AP/AD scaling at all and unlike other runes, it isn't adaptive; it always does magic damage. It also has a cooldown.

I feel like Scorch is only worth using at all if I am picking some sort of super early game oriented champion that would benefit from this rune, and then I snowball and end the game at 15 or 20 minutes. Otherwise I am just handicapping myself. Gathering Storm and Waterwalking are just better options. Gathering Storm is useless early but it scales insanely well. As for Waterwalking, this rune doesn't scale that well late game, but it is still much more useful than Scorch can be. Everytime I use Scorch I wish I had those other two runes instead.

The problem is that buffing Scorch will just make it return to what it was before the nerfs; a rune that is always worth using over the other two because it just gives so much early game power. Riot could avoid that problem by adding an AD/AP scaling to Scorch. Doing this, however, will mean that Scorch will no longer be an early game rune, as it is intended to be.

What to do with Scorch, then?