Yeah, it's a bit sad as it stands right now. If you hit with two shards from Deadly Shard Bomb on an enemy, you just about match Nitro. Meanwhile, hitting a whole swathe of enemies with that damage is really easy with Nitro but a lot of work and unreliable with DSB. If shards at least had huge damage potential that'd be one thing, but hit limits, albeit less bugged, are still present.
It's fine for the core to stay weak, but at a minimum, the outer shards on non-status shard bombs should match the damage of at least a CIV hit, just as a ballpark.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C-ZS4k9_VoyP8qPxCqPMNxwbeZybUJBm...
Shard bombs are actually stronger than nitronome and friends by a bit.
I still find that a buff would be nice for them, seeing as to that they are far more difficult and risky to use than their slight damage increase, and that in order to do that increased damage weakness becomes really prevalent. But that's just like. My opinion.