Drone Branch Issues

[Chewabacca]

I know that most of the conversation at current moment is (rightly) focused around the gamma circuits and the recent alpha circuit nerfs, but I wanted to bring up how much the drone pathway struggles to justify itself. Recently, one of the devs said that the intention for this skill tree is that it will "have 3 unique paths" (circuits, chassis, and drones) and the drone pathway is by far the weakest out of all of these.

Going over the drone skills (6 in all) we have:

• Field Survey 1 & 2: the roto-mapper, a drone that can be sent around the world to map out unexplored locations. While I actually like this skill (mostly because I'm lazy rather than it being particularly good) and have found it helpful for the ocean and caves, the fact remains that once locations have been mapped, something that doesn't take very long, it stops providing any benefit. It's also notably more useless on the mainland compared to plugging in a speed circuit or two and walking around. Field Survey 2 doesn't do anything to help with this, only increasing the range that the roto-mapper can be controlled, which does nothing if you've already mapped everything you want to map. 
• Solution to this: Replace Field Survey 2 with an effect that's useful past the point where everything has been mapped. You could give it a world-loading radius, or something that boosts growth/respawn rates (including boss respawns) within an affected area.
• Transport 1 & 2: the portable storage unit, a drone that does what it says it does. This is fine.
• RC Enthusiast 1 & 2: the zaptrocuter, a drone that can be used for low-damage electric attacks. Important here is that you cannot both use the zaptrocuter and move your character around, giving it very limited use outside of either multiplayer (where it would function like Shadow Prison, stunning the enemy in place while your teammates whale on it) or occasions where you have enough zaptrocuters and time to burn and you just want to mash till your enemy's dead, which I guess is doable but boring. Apart from those situations, I guess it could be used to stun and recruit clockworks but so could a morning star. 
• Solution to this: