I said that the homing/thok are almost the same, but they still work a bit different so they aren't direct clones.what
You just stated that it IS flight just by saying it's infinite flight. It's infinite flight underwater plus waterrun and that's all, much like how the homing attack is just the thok with the ability to home into enemies. In levels with no water in them at all, this is essentially like having no ability whatsoever whereas Telekinesis can actually be used quite often for dealing with enemies. I'd honestly be rather pissed to get the Swim character in Egg Rock Zone 2, where all there is enemies upon enemies and no water to speak of. I get that you just want to include every vanilla ability, but swim is just a useless ability to have in over 75% of the game. Inazuma, a character in 2.0 who uses swim, had a secondary sort of ability to spawn an Attraction Shield as he spins as the creator knew that swim wasn't always going to be useful in every given situation. If you have to make a second ability because your primary ability will almost never be used, that's a pretty bad primary ability.
I wanted to give the swim character good stats, so that they help while playing outside of water levels(much like how silver sonic has nerfed stats because of his float ability.) 1.5x jump, higher acceleration and medium top speed could work, the first 2 are great if you use it with swim, higher jumping out of the water and faster acceleration to move at a good speed underwater.
Swim can be very situational to use, but so are other characters, most of them can't win metal sonic and silver sonic(which has very slow acceleration)+underwater levels=slow, then again there are characters which are perfect for some levels, like silver sonic in CEZ3(you can float and wait for eggman), swim can be useful here too, it helps in DSZ, even in multiplayer you can help other players(check my post for a multiplayer hud display fix). A lot of characters aren't very useful on the later half of the levels, I see some use of telekinesis in CEZ, but it doesn't give you a ability that you can use in the air to help with platforming or something like that, so it feels like a no ability character for the most part.
Swim was a suggestion for that character wad and D00D doesn't want it, so let's stop talking about it.