Counter attack is definetly not useless doctrine.
Personally I like it a lot.
KV-1 is kinda broken with it's veterancy but I still like to spam them

Despite this weird veterancy, it's sometimes useful to swarm enemy with 3 of them, get behind and kill anything.
I wouldn't mess with any auras, especially like this. We have something similar called hull down and it's already not used almost at all.