spells that you would never want.

[Zanos]

Yeah, the devs hate Necromancy. All the good PrCs and whatnot require you to be evil, or at least non-good, spells like Animate Dead have the [Evil] tag, etc.

Now sure, in a system with objective morality you can have things which are victimless but still immoral, but you need to provide some sort of explanation, and that explanation needs to be applied universally. Like, whatever's wrong with Necromancy probably also exists in other things which aren't explicitly called out as evil, and which PCs probably do quite frequently.

Now, if undead just give you overwhelming squick, that's a personal thing. But from a purely utilitarian standpoint, casting Animate Dead in no different than casting Animate Objects, both of which are completely benign. Not that such things would matter to an ordinary murderhobo.

They made it Evil but I don't think they hate it. If they really hated it animate dead would be as bad as create undead. On the contrary, animate dead is among the most powerful effects in the game, potentially giving you 4x your HD in facesmash that doesn't require any magical upkeep. With desecrate you can trot around two skeletons that each have the HP of a 14 con barbarian of twice your level, and the same BAB as a barbarian of your level. They work in antimagic fields and can even use weapons, plus they probably have hilarious strength scores if you used something big and tough like a troll or giant or outsider. Even if you can't find suitable corpses you can still animate some bloodhulks or whatever. In either case they can't be dispelled and continue to work in an antimagic field, and even if someone usurps control they have to succeed an opposed charisma check. Sure most regular people don't like corpses that walk around and kill people for you, but that's nothing a take 20 disguise or extra dimensional storage can't solve.

And then if you really want to cheese it up, non-intelligent undead get no save against command undead, which lasts days/level.

Oh, legend lore. I really don't like legend lore. Material component, focus (albeit cheap), long casting time, and vague effects, in addition to being 6th level for Sor/Wiz. A bard only potentially gets it a level earlier, too, so it being 4th level for them doesn't really help.

It's vague but does provide some guidelines, with each lore result directing you to detailed information, then to information on its location, then information on the actual thing. I'm not sure it's a good spell from a game design perspective because it allows any 11th level wizard with their hands on a 'mysterious item' to determine what it is in at most 40 minutes, but from a pure power perspective it's quite a potent effect, since it can get you information that has been forever lost or never even known by anyone else.