From my personal experience, the engineer seems worse in almost every scenario to the assessor. The assessor's ability to send bundles to the dome without returning, and the fact that those bundles are not limited by size, makes my econ significantly better every time. I can not find a strategy with the engineer to make up for these strengths.

As engineer I prioritize carry weight early because this seems like it is always the bottleneck, but even then I still feel like I need either the lift or the teleporter to get more than one full load up to the dome per wave (which is what I aim for to match the assessor). The lift itself seems terrible for actually carrying resources up, but worth it for the gravity field that causes the resources to stick to it (a perk the assessor gets naturally in the bundle progression). Carry weight also scales worse the deeper you go. As the veins get bigger it becomes harder and harder to collect all the resources. Sure you can do little tricks like only 'carry' the resources in the back and then defy physics to push the resources in the front forward, but you can only do this in a straight line and the benefits are marginal.

As the assessor, larger veins are no problem, as bundles have no size limit. He doesn't need the lift or the teleporter either, which gives me more options early - he can get the spire for better defense, resource converter or condenser for econ, much sooner.

The prestige leaderboards don't seem to agree with my personal experience, though, and there seem to be more engineers up there than assessors. What am I missing?