Palettes can be useful, though, exactly for palette cycling.
Palette cycling means to change (gradually) the color of some or all the colors on the screen. For instance, many games (including QFG4 and Dune) used palette cycling to create day/night cycles: the blue sky turns pink and purple, then dark, and the colors on the ground change accordingly. With palette cycling, it's easy to create very gradual changes across many colors, which is much more difficult to do in 16-bit color. Another common use for palette cycling was to animate running water, like a stream or a fountain. Steady flames and pulsating glowing things could also be achieved easily. These are also relatively simple to do with animated sprites, though.
And parallax scrolling, far from being useless, is an excellent effect that really adds a sense of depth to 2D games. It's used in games like Fate of Atlantis and The Longest Journey.
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