Remove featherfall or make it useful

[Derakon]

Featherfall is almost entirely useless in the current game. All it does is negate a trivial amount of damage from certain traps. I went and looked it up: pits deal 2d6, spiked pits deal 2d6 and have a 50% chance to double that (and some spiked pits are poisoned), and trapdoors deal 2d8. Past the very early game, this is trivial damage, even for gnome mages!

So basically we have a super-specialized ability that is only useful in the first 300' of the dungeon, and past that point does nothing beyond dilute the ability pool for items that have random abilities.

Can we please either make it useful or make it go away? Frankly, I'm not certain how to make it useful, though. Z-descendants replace it with levitation, which is basically featherfall + trapdoors can't change your level, but even that's hyper-specialized. ToME has terrain effects which you can sometimes dodge by levitating, but that would require adding terrain to V -- I doubt that's in the cards. The only other thing I can think of is making it negate some aspect of gravity attacks, but I couldn't think of anything that wasn't horribly gimmicky.

Suggestions?