First I'll just point out calling Develop total garbage was a slight exaggeration, it's more... very weak in most cases.
No, here are some good examples of Develop being a good card:
-Cursers, no other trashing.
No. Unless the game is going to end up being really long anyway because of other brutal attacks, you're going to be better off buying a silver or other $3, rather than adding an extra essentially dead card to your deck so you might be able to use your action twice if you collide it with a curse to gain 1 VP and get rid of a dead card. I did a little testing with e.g. BM+Witch against BM+Witch+Develop for example, and the best conditions I could get for the Develop were basically the ones that bought the Develop as late as possible (e.g. if you have >=6 curses is a pretty close loss - if you have 6 curses, you're probably gonna lose anyway, but buying the Develop still hurts you!)
-Border Village w/$7 card
Border Village, Develop, and one of four cards costing $7? That falls comfortably into the extremely rare conditions category. Not to mention it's not even that good. You need to actually draw the BV and a Develop together, and well, which $7 were you really hoping to fit into a BV/Develop strategies? It's going to depend a lot on the $5's, and that makes it even harder to be successful.
-Familiar w/Golem and 2P
Even rarer conditions than above, for a combo that's not. Golem into Develop? Sounds like a quick way to lose.
-Sea Hag
This can be helpful, but you need to collide the Sea Hag (or two) with your Develop in a deck likely full of curses. If it is, this is pretty unlikely to be useful. If it's not, then, well, I presume you have trashing, and the value of TFBing the Sea Hag into a $5+$3 compared to just trashing it (especially as the trashing you have might be trash for benefit anyway!) is not going to be worth the oppertunity cost of buying the Develop, trying to collide them and being left with the Develop at the end still anyway. I'd probably say this is a very minor improvement over just flat Sea Hags.
-Cutpurse
Uhh... why?
-Any other card that loses its value later in the game.
This can certainly make Develop an option in some situations, but most of the time you don't buy enough earlygame cards to make the Develops actually valuable. It might sound like a really good strategy to buy some Trade Posts early, thin your early cards into Silvers then turn the Trade Posts into Golds and some $4's with Develop later, but you need to actually draw those Trade Posts and Develops together later, which is difficult.
Really, all of those reasons are things that can make Develop not totally ignorable, but you need a good 2-3 of them to even make Develop a noticable improvement over a silver.
Chancellor is good with Stash. Other than that, it is usually garbage.
Wrong twice. Chancellor is AMAZING with Stash, it's an extremely strong two card combo. It can just e.g. tank past curses from a BM+Witch deck, green early, and pick up Provinces at a very rapid pace. And other than that, it's a terminal Silver with a decent secondary effect. Discarding your deck on average is a fairly good thing until late in the game, it speeds up getting purchaces into your deck and can circumvent a number of deck inspection attacks. It's not great - it's certainly no Swindler, but it's a generally overlooked and often useful terminal Silver. In the absensce of other terminals, I'm certainly picking it up over Fortune Teller and, depending on the other cards, quite often over Navigator and Woodcutter.