Restoring "Exponential summoning"

I suppose having to take a feat is a decent tradeoff considering the 2E restrictions the drow (as well as the other "demihuman" races) faced. Hell, as I recall, gnomes couldn't even reach level 20.

and an efficency drivenchar will probaly want to invest a feat elesewhere
You mean optimized builds? I'd think most DMs would want to discourage that sort of thing unless they only plan to run boring smash-and-grab campaigns.

The first is maybe something like, "I have a polearm-based fighter with combat reflexes, and every feat I can add to that (such as Pathfinder's feats like Lunge with it's revision of Whirlwind Attack, and the Combat Patrol feat from the APG)."

The second such as that idea of Recursive Summoning, is something along the lines of, "Well it's the 2nd round of combat, and he's taking all his actions... It's going to be at least an hour before everything gets resolved for his turn, let's all go down to the store to pick up some food or buy some beer".

There's a huge difference between optimizing your character and being a munchkin. You can optimize for all sorts of things besides combat, it's about nothing more than making your character mechanically good at the things you want them to be flavorfully good at. Optimization to ridiculous extremes can get awful, yes, but it's not bad as a whole.

If your character is meant to be good at fighting in their fluff, why wouldn't you optimize them for combat? Or if they're meant to be good at stealth, why not optimize them for that? Or anything along those lines, anything that's covered by mechanics. Saying otherwise is like saying "well, I think they're good at playing an instrument, but if I give them high Perform ranks that might be unfair". Optimization doesn't have to preclude roleplaying, and in fact it can enhance it by letting the mechanical outcome of events better fit your personal descriptive image of them.

Beyond that, looking into methods of optimization can be a great way to get a deeper understanding of the system, in order to better understand why some builds just are awful in certain circumstances and others aren't. Even if you hate the idea of min/maxing, being useless in combat (not useless as in "not the best", but literally doing nothing more than plinking at the enemy) when you don't want to be useless in combat can feel awful; I know from personal experience, it just makes you feel like in a combat scene you might as well not even be there when the best you can do is "aid another" on the guys that don't suck. And the knowledge gained from looking into the ways people make optimized builds can help to avoid making a build that's inadvertently awful.

And yeah, I said that stuff is dumb. But I do optimization stuff in concert with fluff rather than in lieu of it, so there's a counter-anecdote right there.