Lucky for you, I did see your deleted comment, so it is intriguing why you have decided to delete it and not allow commentary on it? Though, switching to FoE to mitigate damage should be the absolute last resort, you would be better off using Second Wind/Bloodbath and staying in FoF. There was no issue with using RoE either, it had such a short cooldown and you didn't need that many positional ignoring stacks either. If its a dungeon fight where your tank and healer decided to have a nap, you would be better off killing the boss quicker, RoE again reduces damage and still allows you to keep full damage, which also benefits Bloodbath and Second Wind. You aren't going to be surviving any significant amount of time without a healer, FOE or not.

However, you have failed to address the core issue. How often did you actually use them? As I stated, the vast majority of Monks stayed in FoF 99% of the time, making it essentially a permanent damage buff. It was a filler action. If you had all 3 Fists and none of them provided a damage benefit, then you wouldn't see this issue. I have said in the past that, instead of removing them completely, you can have them as lesser Riddles, eg. Fists of Fire at level 40, gives a 5% damage increase for 20 seconds on a 60 second cooldown, then a trait at 68 that changes it to Riddle of Fire which increases the damage up to 15% and use similar concepts for the others.

At the end of the day, a buff that you do not have to manage which is uninteresting. The other fists never done anything of interest except Fists of Wind have the Tornado Kick rotation at the end of SB and being in FoW at the start of ShB, purely because it gave access to GL4. By keeping them, it just adds unused actions that could be used elsewhere.