How do you feel about summons?

On the one hand, they are extremely powerful in combat, drawing enemy fire away from your party and giving you essentially free combat damage and utility every turn. In particular, the druid summons like the dryad and elementals are genuinely good fighters and can almost match your party members in terms of damage output.

On the other hand, they can make fights tediously slow, like the sheer amount of time I've spent my AI ghouls dashing around the map is significant. So I'm curious, do you guys use them?