I agree, I also find him too slow for most of my crews, once he's committed to a direction/location on the board it's very hard to reposition him. I much prefer taking the Valedictorian myself, faster, more flexible (flight does wonders), generally as tanky if not more so and has the potential to still hit reasonably hard. Also allows you to counter models with nasty triggers (Collette I'm looking at you!) That being said with Kirai the slowness is somewhat negated by her movement shenanigans.