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TLDR: High jump is extremely difficult, despite the payoff for accomplishing it being negligible. The skill feats Powerful Leap and Quick Jump interact oddly, and Quick Jump makes the (already weak) monk feat Flying Kick entirely redundant. Long jump has similar problems, but doesn't use a fixed DC so it's less egregious.
According to the difficulty classes section:
A high-difficulty skill DC can be overcome by a character who has increased their proficiency rank in a skill but doesn’t have a high score in the associated ability (like if a typical rogue were attempting an Athletics check). This is the default difficulty in Pathfinder. High-difficulty DCs are a good choice for skill checks that require only one character succeed for the party to benefit.
The "High jump" athletics skill use has a fixed DC of 30 to jump 2 extra vertical feet beyond the "Leap" (at the cost of another action and 10' of movement beforehand). By the chart of skill DCs by level and difficulty, this makes it a high difficulty task for a level 12 character. By way of comparison, this is also the difficulty of an athletics check to move an Immovable Rod (can also be accomplished with 8000 pounds of pressure).
If you get a 40 on your high jump check, then you get another 3 feet (up to 8) and an extra 5 horizontal feet. The leap action, by contrast, doesn't require any check at all.
The "Powerful Leap" skill feat makes the check-less Leap action grant 5 feet of vertical movement. It's a 2nd level feat despite granting what effectively is better than an autosuccess on what is apparently a high-DC 12th level task. It also basically negates the benefit of "Quick Jump" (1st level), which lets you skip the initial movement/extra action cost for high jump and long jump. It does absolutely nothing if you want to roll high jump to get that last 3' that's theoretically possible on a critical success (for those level 20 characters that need to dunk over an 8' giant, I guess).
Long jump is almost as bad, in that 10' more horizontal movement is DC 25 and 15' more movement is DC 30 (it's only +5'/+10' for a character with 30 speed). Powerful leap adds 5' to your Leap, but similarly does nothing to the DCs of long jump.
I started looking at these because I was looking at the monk and wanted to build a super-mobility elf monk. There might be other options with other classes, but I haven't reviewed them all yet and put forth this monk as my example. At level 4, this monk has a speed of 50 (Elf with Nimble ancestry feat for 35 at level 1, Fleet general feat and Incredible Movement at level 3 for 50). Crane Stance at level 1 gives an additional 5' horizontal or 2' vertical movement, as well as an extra +4 conditional bonus on the high/long jump athletics checks. Taking Powerful Leap (skill feat) and Dancing Leaf (Monk feat) at level 4, they interact to let the monk take the bog-standard Leap (single action) to jump 12' vertically or 30' horizontally, with no chance of failure (and take no falling damage if adjacent to a wall). At this level, there is still only a 5% chance of success of making a high jump roll without Crane Stance (bumps up to 20% with crane stance and a 5% chance for critical success, finally netting that last 3 vertical feet), despite taking an extra action to run up. There's a 55% chance of critically failing and falling prone (35% with Crane Stance). Technically basic failure/success would both give the same result of 5' vertical, because of powerful leap.
And this seems pretty optimal for level 4.
But let's keep going. Level 12, where 30 is high DC:
Our hopping specialist now has 20 str, and with the boots, expert athletics, and crane stance, that's a +25 to jumps. Failure is down to 25%, critical failure still sits at 5%, and critical success is all the way up to 30%! Truly, that extra 3' is in reach 30% of the time! Somewhere, surely, we used another skill feat for quick jump, so all these attempts at high jumps don't require the extra action/run up.
Level 14: Now we get the level 14 greater boots of bounding, for that delicious +4 to jumps. It's better than the belt of giant strength (another level 14 item) because obviously we only care about jumping. We're Sitting pretty with a +29 to jumps in crane stance, we no longer have any chance of falling prone on a critical, and we're up to a 50% chance of getting that extra 3' for bothering to try for the critical success!
At level 20, we hit strength 22 naturally, but we bought that belt of giant strength, so that makes 24. We've been legendary in athletics since level 15. We are truly tops at hops. Crane stance and the greater boots gives us a total of 38. We have a 90% chance of getting a critical success for that precious last 3 vertical feet we've been chasing since level 7. Everyone else is wasting daily resonance on fly, or climbing, or whatever else might bypass these vertical jumps that are more than 15' and less than 18'.
In summary, it's ridiculous to try to get a success on high jump, never mind a critical success. Powerful leap completely supplants it, effectively, as long as you're willing to forego the possibility of a critical success (which technically exists but requires a lot of additional resources, is unreliable until really high levels, and only gets 3' more anyway...which is nothing if you're dumping this many resources into jumping in the first place).
I agree with your analysis. I foresee a lot of Leap actions and very few jumping actions, especially high jump. Have you looked at the wall jump feat?