Gifted was 100% a waste for this bro, with that resolve you can also run fearsome.
And yeah, underdog is for stable frontliners.
Gifted is a top tier perk for amazing bros, when you already have a lot of mdef for example, additional 3 taking your chances of being hit from 8% to 5% is insanely good. It's far less impactful on shitters where it doesn't really matter whether that barbarian chosen will have 50 or 53% chance to bonk you on the head. Similar with matk, when you actually encounter some fucker like bladedancer champion with ~90 mdef you will be grateful for every single point of matk on your top tier bros. Additional resolve or hp is a nice bonus too. There really aren't many good enough perks to potentially replace gifted on good bros.
Personally I'm a big hater of recover, I would replace it to get steel brow. After the nerfs it's just dogshit, 99% of fights when you get to the point some of your guys are out of fat, the fight is already in the cleanup phase anyway, and even then with normal fat recovery and weapon mastery bros should all be able to swing once per turn, so:
Without recover:
Turn 1. You swing once.
Turn 2. You swing once. (2 total)
Turn 3. You swing once. (3 total)
With recover:
Turn 1. You use recover.
Turn 2. You swing twice (2 total)
Turn 3. You swing twice (4 total)
Only by turn 3 recover starts giving any real benefits, and you're already so late in the fight by the time you're using it, 3 turns are basically an eternity. It's a waste of a perk, outside of a few very niche builds which spend unholy amounts of fat and can't really function at all with normal fat regen (fencer for example).
