A: I took swinging as a travel power this past weekend. The mechanics are annoying, and I'm pretty sure I figured out how it worked completely by accident.
B: Depending on how my teammates had their travel power enhanced and/or how much higher level I was than said teammates, I actually was faster than them with Ninja Run about half the time.
Was able to do that kind of stuff occasionally without Ninja Run.
SR Scrappers almost didn't even need travel powers at all, except for something like a Hamidon raid(or the STF nerfed version of it) or a random trip into the Shadow Shard, and temporary flight powers helped in those situations, but really they went unused for 90% of the time you'd play on that character.
Making the Fitness pool inherent only increased the likelihood that an SR character would skip travel powers, since now Swift and Hurdle were considered inherent. I want to say, between Swift, Quickness, and Sprint alone, I was clocking upwards of 70 MPH, which if I recall was slightly faster than unslotted Fly, and Hurdle/Combat Jumping gave me enough verticle movement that I only rarely would need a jet-pack to get up to somewhere out of reach...
And sometimes, out of boredom, maybe impatience, I'd pop Elude between missions just to be able to get there a little bit faster, as Elude also increased movement speed and jump height, and this was around the time when I tried building a toon to actually have near-perma Elude(was never able to get it to be permanent, sadly... One of my few regrets, the other being never successfully soloing an AV. I'd get an AV down about a third of its health before I ran out of endurance, dropped toggles, and everything would go sour from there...), so by the time everyone else got to the mission, Elude crashed and was already recharged.
I actually ended up completely omitting travel powers from one of my two builds after getting the hang of moving around like that(the other build had Super Speed and Super Jump, and was built for PvP, so the travel powers were kind of needed to keep up with other players...), and also out of boredom.