Just to be clear, the 529 has three tax benefits: immediate state tax deductions (in states that offer it -- obviously not an issue in TX where there's no income tax to deduct it from); tax-free growth; and tax-free withdrawals when used for educational expenses. So not getting an immediate tax deduction is only part of the game -- and not necessarily the most important one.
IMO, there is so much flexibility built into a 529 that I am pretty confident it will be used somehow. If your kid doesn't go to college, you can use it for private HS or trade school or comparable stuff (and many, if not most, careers that allow you to make a reasonable income require some version of post-HS education). If your kid goes right to work, they can use it later on if they discover that, say, business or accounting classes are necessary if they want to open their own shop. If your kid gets a scholarship, you can withdraw the equivalent amount, pay the taxes, but not pay the 10% penalty -- in which case you're no worse off than if you'd put it in a taxable account to start with. You can also use it for books and other types of incidental expenses that scholarships don't typically cover. If your kid really doesn't ever need to use it, you can roll it over to another kid, to yourself, or even to a niece/nephew/grandkid. Or, yeah, worse comes to worst, you take it out, pay the taxes on the growth (same as if it was a regular taxable account), and then pay a 10% penalty on the growth. Not exactly the end of the world.
FWIW, I also think the 529 can be especially valuable if your kid is out of the norm. My DD, for ex, has pretty bad ADHD. We were lucky that she got her act together and is doing fine. But for a few years, I was pretty convinced that "college" was going to need to be a specialty college that caters to ADHD kids -- and, boy, those are not cheap. But even without needing to go to that extreme, her issues made our local StateU a non-option -- that school can barely graduate normal kids in 4-5 years, and I wasn't going to pay for a kid to fall through the cracks. Having the 529 allowed us to focus on schools that were more likely to fit her particular learning needs and personality issues. Sure, we could have saved to pay the same amount of tuition in a taxable account, but we'd have gotten a lot less bang for our buck.
There are also issues with the other options as well. Roths are great and highly flexible -- but I'd use that for college only if I was 100% confident that I was on track for my retirement savings without the Roth. IMO, there are only so many tax-favored options for savings, so I'd rather use the Roth/tIRA for retirement and the 529 for college, vs. the Roth for college and a taxable account for retirement. UTMAs are great, but if you're looking for financial aid, those are counted as the student's assets and will be sucked completely dry, whereas 529s are counted as the parents' assets (in most cases; some schools do their own calculus and treat them differently) -- and, of course, as noted above, those are legally the kid's property at 18, whether you want them to have it then or not.
Basically, there is no perfect option. Me, I'm erring on the side of college + maximizing taxable accounts. And it's certainly paid off so far (knock on wood!).