That's not all they're good for. I have one player who can only play at infrequent intervals, but is good at roleplaying and such, and always find a good reason to leave his character out of adventures for a while. His character is insane(literally), so the last session we played, the party slew a dragon at the end, so he decided to have his character live in the remains. Which led to a discussion on how feasible that would really be, but is overall an interesting thing to do.
Also, yeah, looks like the mob template will have to be used instead of the swarm. Still worth it.