I'm glad that you had some good times when you were playing with the LaCroix kin, numbah one thing in Malifaux is having a blast while playing.
Though I'm having a few issues with what you are saying about Ophelia and her gremlins and not able to go toe to toe with any master. I disagree vehemently with Jonas about the Henchmen and their inablility to perform well against masters, and if you think about it, Pandora, Dreamer, and Hamelin, while tough, are not impossible to beat with the LaCroix. As you know and I'm sure everyone reading this knows, you do not need to kill their models to win in Malifaux.
PANDORA:
With Pandora, I feel as though you have to focus Candy as quickly as possible, not only does she heal, but her abilities are nasty. The best way to deal with the Pandora crew, is having your lacroix gremlins far back, and ready to pepper the hell out of her crew. The easiest way to do this is Rami, he has one of the longest ranges in the game, so, use it to your advantage. Most of the deadly spells in the pandora crew are 12 inches, so have Ophelia give rami the ram, and use dumb luck to really hurt the enemy.
So Candy, Pandora, and kade(Im not sure if he does or not) have martyr, which allows other woes in base contact to take their wounds for them. This can be really annoying for us and our focus firing, however, if we use reckless on rami, with the ram from ophelia, thats a lot of damage at three range 16 shots. This output will really force Pandora to make really tough decisions and put her on the back foot. If teddy comes charging forward, use pere, Young'uns, raphael, and Francois as your counter charge and take him out.
Number one thing to not do against Pandora, is focus fire her early; it is really easy for the LaCroix gremlins to fail their WP checks to target her, and then lose that precious "alpha strike" action point. Try and whittle down her models and focus on grabbing objectives later on in the game. Use reckless for three moves and you'll see how quick our gremlins are. Also use schemes that will benefit you, such as "kill protege: teddy" or something along those lines.
DREAMER:
Against the dreamer, you have to be really careful, as he is going to just dick around first turn with alps and out activate you to prime the alp bomb, or just regular dreamer shenanigans. If you can, use rami to put some damage on them if you can, but just be prepared for the popping out chompy on isolated models tactics.
If I were to face the dreamer I would have francois and Raphael as my front line, because they are the most solid of the crew. Then once they get into the combat, you are the LaCroix, just shoot the huge neverborn bastard.
I have never played against the dreamer, so I can only say for you to turtle a bit and wait for him to make a mistake.
HAMELIN:
We have discussed numerous ways for beating Hamelin already in this thread, and as this post is already a wall of text, I won't go into it any further. But same things apply.
TL;DR: Ophelia can beat ANY master in the game. (So can Von Schill for that matter) Ideas for beating Pandora, Chompy, and Blasts pwn rats/ratcatchers.
Hope that this helps
Frere