[Kameron8]

Personally I think cooldowns are the better solution. Soldier shouldn't have its powerful skills gutted on the assumption you are going to use them twice in a row to double up on damage, at least not now that we have another way to limit spamming them.

I'm inclined to disagree, simply because there's a fairly large number of available autohits to pad cooldown periods. The fact that you are almost always better off using retreating swipe/roundtrip/peddling wheel/crystal rose over basic attacking -- both because it will do more damage than a non-critical basic attack, and it doesn't have to fight evade -- leads me to believe the numbers just need to be tuned down.

In what rotation are they being used effectively?

It's not mmo-style rotation, but if you use a build that disregards normal attacks entirely, generally you will have access to three or four different attacks that automatically hit at any one time, minimum. I'll briefly list the most common taken and maxed skills for MA/Soldier/Duelist.

Soldier: Retreating Swipe, Shinken, Roundtrip, Turnover. All of these sit at 150% scaling, except Roundtrip, which is 145%. That's 10% less than face stomp and Lance de Lion, and on par with execute. Both Black Knight and Demon Hunter also host numerous additional autohits that can be added to this list.

Duelist: Crystal Rose. Nothing further for this base class, just the one area attack that is almost always run with either an ice or lightning badge. It will do more damage than a weapon's crit, if swift crystal rose critically hits. (Assuming all defenses equal)

Martial Artist: Peddling Wheel, Heaven Kick, and occasionally Light Tomahawk. Verglas and monk also have a sizable chunk to add to these.

There are enough that adding short cooldowns will accomplish very little, as alternating between the skills will allow you to handle at least 2 turns without double dipping. Additionally, by leveraging charging strike, meditate, or high momentum Guard, there would need to be enormous cooldowns to cause any significant change to the tanky autohitter archetype.

Some autohits deserve high scaling, like the aforementioned Lance de Lion and Face stomp. But the ones people are frequently using are not those. I'd rather see the scaling cut from some very particular skills.