They're the cheapest squad in the game, they are fine. If you want them to fight well put a flamer on them and use merge. A common opening is getting another CE as your second unit, it's not because they are bad.
All the different engineers are good in their own unique way now, they're all pretty balanced. I would have said Royal Engineers were the worst before they added the snare to them in the last patch. You need to factor in more than just raw combat performance.
