There are two ways of measuring how bad a card is. The first is how much you really don't want that card in your deck - say your opponent hits you with a swindler; these are the cards you hope he doesn't swindle your cards into. Scout is fairly bad but not horrible by these standards, and it's pretty average in a hoard deck by those standards. The other way to measure, which I subscribe to a bit more, is how often you will choose to buy/gain it, given the alternatives available to you. By this measure, scout is one of the worst 4s in the game - keep in mind it virtually always has to compete with silver. In the deck you're describing, it's not nearly so bad, but as jonts26 points out, just when do you have the time? Now the exception I make is that both hoard and scout work quite well with the mixed cards - Island, Great Hall, Nobles, and Harem. So in a deck with hoard and those, I may well go for it quite a bit more often.