I’m going to post a wall of text here. This is how things break down as I see it, by category:
ICE
Anarchs interact mainly with an ICE’s Strength. The lower the better. Shapers interact with its subtypes and number of subroutines–despite Atman being Shaper, they corner the market on “making edge cases happen.” And Criminal interacts with an ICE’s rez cost. (Reina and Xanadu notwithstanding.) The problem is, ICE rez costs have been creeping downwards, giving the corporation the advantage here. This has been good for the game, overall, but Criminals need to be able to interact with the changing meta.
As you noted, sentry breakers are generally terrible, or Mimic. I think this is a deliberate design decision. The main problem, I guess, is that Mimic is clearly good, and the designers don’t want to come up to that level of power. So they print more sub-par cards. It’s worth noting that sentry breakers like Mongoose aren’t the floor of Criminal Breaker power–they’re the ceiling.
CORP BOARD STATE:
Shapers win by looking at R&D and stealing agendas there. Anarchs win through trashing either agendas or the defenses that keep them out of agenda-filled servers. Criminals win by… well, how do they win, exactly?
Criminals are fine with the corporation drawing cards–they want to access from HQ! But they can only do that if the corporation has no place to put these cards to good use. So the Criminal game plan seems to be choking off scoring opportunities until there’s a nice wad of agendas to take. Economic denial (Read: Account Siphon Spam) seems to be the only trick in their pocket for doing so–that, and perhaps Geist’s “Breakers everywhere” deck.
It’s also worth noting that Shapers don’t typically interact with the corp’s board state; Anarchs like trashing everything; and Criminals want to derez things. They really do–they just don’t have the tools to do so.
RUNNER BOARD STATE
Criminals, once sold as the “economy faction,” aren’t. Sure, they can get money from runs, but they’re probably losing money in the long run, whereas Shaper and Anarch economies are powerhouses. Lots of ink on this, I’ll leave it at that.
Shapers are happy pulling out cards from the Stack, and somewhat okay with pulling cards out of the heap–their draw cards only mildly encourage overdrawing, and they’ve got SMC. This makes them pretty difficult to rush against. Anarchs wildly overdraw, because they want to pull cards out of the heap. They’ve got some of the best recursion around. Criminals try to get the perfect hand–all of their cards bring cards to hand to then play later. The problem with that is that the runner can’t “combo out” by playing a certain number of cards, like SEA-Scorched. This makes their style of draw fairly weak. On top of that, they have no recursion, so even if a combo like this was printed, it could only fire once in-faction.
I’m sure there’s more to say, but here are some places where the color pie is kind of well established. I’d say that Criminal, like Weyland, just doesn’t live up to certain base requirements needed for a viable deck.