>Does Wise Recovery essentially swap out your wisdom/con for
>the stat that determines your healing rate?

Yup.

>It just dawned on me that if that's the case, essentially
>every elf should take this cheap edge no matter what.

Well, yes and no.

It would make pretty much every elf regenerate HP faster. Or every gnome. Etc.

But there's still an opportunity cost to buying it. It's not that cheap -- probably there's some other edge that's useful to your character that costs about the same. Also, some characters may not care a lot about their HP recovery rate.