sorry, couldn't help but be bothered by this so I went ahead and took a look at Kanican's enmity research.
Now we all agree that you'll hit hate cap right? that's 10,000 units CE.
So all this extra swinging won't get you extra static hate, it'll only give you that "last action."
Mathematically we can argue that provoke isn't useless at all. It'll generate +1800 VE for the 30 seconds that it's down, which is most likely more you can generate in one action (better a single Job Ability than several, right? Less delay loss.)
Therefore, since VE adds to CE (and they don't share to cap) Provoke is beneficial to a situation with capped hate.