Abductors as they function at the moment I'd view as a failure, they have the possibility to allow for a lot of cool gimmick things to happen with the many glands and an opportunity to directly influence the round without straight up murder which I think is a super cool thing. The glands are also cool and can change how people play in reaction to them alongside Hypno.
However, abductors spawn a bit too late and by the time they're able to spawn the shuttle is coming in 4 or everyone is armed to the teeth and make it impossible to do anything, furthermore, hulk makes their one weapon completely useless and them unable to do a thing and that gets unlocked and lapped up around 30 minutes in. Moving them to round start would allow them to influence the round in a positive way.
It's an antagonist that isn't killing people but instead moving to silently change the crew and be a subversive force within and throughout the round. This is a nice change of pace from all the murder antagonists and will allow a lot of the normal crew who aren't usually involved to get involved by being stolen and made to do stuff or getting cool glands, unlike other antagonists that grab players (Revs prioritise robust usually, cult makes a priority of robust players, flesh heretic gets robust ghouls) abductors don't particularly target these kinds of players and instead grab anyone they can or less robust players because they don't want to get btfoed and killed meaning more people would get grabbed.
I will address a point of criticism I received when bringing this up on discord,
I don't think the crew being weak at the start of the round is a bad thing as it allows the antagonist to interact with the round without being validhunted to shit. As abductors don't kill and instead stun and grab players, I don't think them being strong is a bad thing as it allows them to add subversive elements easier into the round. Whereas the stun is frustrating if they go around stunning players, yes, from my experience this isn't really the case and at most they stun a few people and run away. I would like to at least trial this to see if it spices up rounds at all or if it ends as a frustrating mess.my point is that the abductor baton is too strong to ever make it into a round as a shift-start role because the crew being able to fight back at that point is severely handicapped in that "setup phase"