20 mins of playtime with the new mine timings, and it seems pretty OK actually. They are a lot more easily usable now and a fair bit more powerful. My accuracy with deploying them effectively has gone way up. You can even do ninja-like stuff like jump over an enemies head, deploy, and they will be caught in the blast usually. This type of tactic could either be considered OP or cool. Using them is definitely less thoughtful now, which I miss a bit, but that is made up for to some extent by you being able to use the attack more reactively which suits the recent increase in fluidity of the gameplay.
So yeah, still on the fence a little, but overall seems good I think. I'd need to play a bit deeper into the game, though, to see whether they are a little bit too useful. A bit OP. At the moment I'm on Skilled using the Apoth and I'm tearing up the levels, but I am still very early into the game so that's probably to be expected.