Only if you decide you're defining a sensation and not some physical phenomenon...That, to me, makes defining color through qualia a definition that isn't useful all that often.

That's the definition used in the overwhelming majority of cases. Careful, technical texts often make it clear that color is a sensation. Even Isaac Newton stressed that "the rays [of light] are not colored".

Even wikipedia goes with the sensation definition of color: "Color...is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, blue, yellow, etc...The color of an object depends on both the physics of the object in its environment and the characteristics of the perceiving eye and brain."

In everyday use, when a person says things like "hand me the blue towel", that person usually does not care, know, or even think about reflectance profiles and spectral power distributions. Usually all that person cares about is that the towel "looks blue" to him and the person he's talking to. He'll say "that towel is blue" just like he'll say "that chocolate is bitter".

It's very useful to have definitions that depend on human sensations. You and I are both humans, and we often have conversations with other humans.