Yeah, Smokes aren’t seen as valuable because Ranged Enemies are a JOKE in Auric and below.
They really are. One decent Psyker with Blaze Bolt or Inferno M1 will pretty much shut down gunners completely for the entire mission. They exist purely to buff players.
The only time they become an issue is when the game spawns 10 of them at once and spreads them out in an open event area, when they get the opportunity to beam players down before the players can see where they’re at because the players are doing the event/dealing with hordes.