I basically agree with you. I figured even a crude poll made more sense as a way to summarize LWers' views on cold fusion than simply posing questions in a Discussion post, but reasonable people can disagree with that call.

Cold fusion that would generate power seems much less likely than "there's interesting chemistry going on in the setups that is a real phenomenon and isn't well understood."

This is true, but I'd guess power generation is the dominant reason for most outside observers' interest in cold fusion (such as it is). Cf. ordinary hot fusion, which motivates interesting research about MHD instabilities, designing tokamak casing materials, and so on, but is nonetheless mostly of interest as a potential power source.