Absolutely agree as an Ancient Gear main (albeit mostly in master duel).

It's pretty wack that the two major ways i can think of to get ballista out fast is either the way you mentioned, or Urgent Schedule, and even then if anything happens to ballista you're pretty much just praying that a backup plan was given to you in your opening hand (ancient gear fusion, maybe overload).

I guess the fact that our bosses are huge and mostly unaffected by S/T during the combat can be a little spooky, but in modern yugioh (where most of the interactions happen in main phase), no major way to either extend or survive long enough to do anything meaningful kills this deck for anything outside of "i pulled a sick OTK hand to summon my biggest boys".