Two gun mojo and Assult rifle - Although there is a slight difference (rifle does more dmg the longer to use it) is it really worth having both?

Ebon Rift and Shadow embrace - Although there is a difference in the area of dmg. The difference isn't too great.

Are the bigger differences than this, or are the moves pointless?

oh... not what I tought. otherwise I would have nominated Thundering kicks as most pointless power in the game. in the least effective Framework in game at the moment...

thunderbolt lunge... it used to be a bit overpowered, but it got hit so hard with the nerf bat that it needs wheelchair access now.

the whole martial arts mechanic is hard to make work well, at best it's weak. the momentum idea is 'bad' in pvp, and the offensive passives are all horribly (make that HORRIBLY) underpowered. and nearly all of the martial arts attacks are so weak in actual damage that they just don't compare to any other powersets. I remember melee was supposed to get 20% extra damage to compensate for it's added risks & positional issues... realistically that figure should be more like 40%. But they implemented this through strength, which comes with problems on crit-oriented melee builds. It should scale to strength *and/or* dexterity, up to the cap... But more importantly the base damage numbers on most of the martial arts powers just plain suck. and suck+20% still equals suck.

gunslinger... it's how to build energy as slowly as you possibly can. which is a pity, since it thematically fits with a lot of character ideas.

holds in general... they are either already nerfed to the point of being pointless, or they will be after 50 billion pvper's complain that they got held and couldn't do anything and then someone killed them and it was the worst thing that ever happened to them in their life. there are only a couple halfway decent holds left, and they're on the nerf chopping block in the near future. "control" in CO will be an oxymoron soon. which incidentally will make EGO as a stat for a support role character kinda gimp as well. Controllers were my favorite archetype in CoH, but in CO there is (or will be) no such role.