Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!
Maybe the skill is worded a bit weirdly but it doesn't do what you though it did. It reads:
Fill all surrounded empty tiles with ([2]) when placing ([1])
Meaning that it will fill all the empty single tile gaps you have on the board. So it's really meant for patching up some mistakes and it like quite a few other skills has few upgrade skills for it too (available only after getting the base one first) like allowing to fill 2 tile gaps or also scoring when filling with it.
Just having the transforms add some score by themselves would be a bit too good in comparison to everything else. It has quite a high chance of comboing with itself so it might get out of hand quick. Well it does have the downside of transforming randomly so you always have the risk of triggering unwanted things too like all those minus score skills. There are quite a lot of skills that don't really do much by themselves but obviously the column/row transforms take a while to act out and understandably will feel unrewarding.