I went in trying to be as charitable as possible, looked for workflows that might have opened up.

Unfortunately the answer is no.

The problem with trying to find a use for the touchbar can be illustrated with what the touchbar does when you're using Google Chrome: it shows you the current URL, and tapping it focuses Chrome's navigation bar. So it's basically a completely pointless round-trip from screen->touchbar->screen.

Any compelling touchbar feature has to somehow overcome that massive drawback.

simply no.