Generally I'm a fan of anything that rewards you for doing what you're going to do anyway. Desperado is king of this idea, along with Engineering the Future. You're a runner. You're going to run. And hopefully you're going to run successfully. Any time you do, you're rewarded for it. It's not a huge reward, but it's 1c on top of whatever you were already going to do.

My biggest annoyance with Desperado is that it's so useful that every other criminal console basically has to answer the question "Why are you choosing this over Desperado"?

At 3 influence, it can be painful to splash in to other factions. But for a criminal runner, unless you have a focused plan that requires a different console, it's hard not to add in Desperado.