For the moment, they are a centerpiece for my mc and he will heavily lean into and promote them during the course of his revolution. A non-eclect helot managing to outfox and overpower “the right sort of people” should count for something.
I feel we may have less of a choice, still my mc generally dislikes mercenaries too with the possible exception of privateers, should that prove a viable thing. Otherwise he’d only use the more classical, land based mercenaries in a possible cold war with Halassur and then only for highly dirty, highly dangerous ops requiring plausible deniability.