Glyph of Totemic Vigor
Besides which, you mentioned yourself Totemic Projection, which also serves to protect totems, and particularly Capacitor Totem, by letting you hide it out of LoS while it charges, and then tossing it where it needs to be immediately before it triggers.
As for the totem tier; TP is about protecting totems from destruction or placing them with less risk to yourself. The other two are about using totems more often; Totemic Restoration almost halves the cooldown on Grounding Totem, used properly. Call of the Elements lets you pop utility totems like Grounding back to back. They serve their purpose just fine. If you're finding it "useless", it's because you're not using totems enough to make it worthwhile, which brings us around to pointing out that you're complaining about something that, by your own admission, isn't much of an issue.
There's issues that could be worked on, but deliberately ignoring the tools we have to address the issue, to exaggerate the problem beyond what is reasonable or accurate, is not helpful discussion.