I can definitely agree that buffing before a fight is pointless because of the short duration. Buffs in general are pretty short and it's hard to justify using them a lot of the time, because buffing costs AP. Depending on a lot of factors, including AP costs of the buff, it can potentially take away one precious turn away from the time you are buffed, for lack of AP to do anything else.
15 rounds seems like too much, that's 90 seconds out of combat.
In another thread, I noted that the problem with food's healing wasn't just limited to food. Potions also suffered from diminishing returns as the game continued, because both health and magical healing increase as your level increase, but item-based healing does not scale. Food gets the worst of it though.
To that end I suggested that food's healing effect should be heals X amount per turn every turn, but you can't use another food item until it wears off, and potions should be a percentage-based heal. (That does have the problem of potions being sucky early on, and I didn't realize there were at least 4 potion qualities until now.)
