As I said in some other thread about a completely different card, the worth of Ranger is more than the sum of its parts. It's simply much easier to fire off your engine when your first draw is a ludicrous 5 cards, even if you burn an Action to reverse the token later. The +2 Buys you get with your two plays is also really nice since you often would spend terminal space on +Buy cards if you had to. So despite it drawing on average 2.5 cards per play, I think it is a very powerful draw card in certain circumstances - basically whenever you want to draw a lot of cards at once to make sure you play your engine components in the right order or get to them in time.
Yeah, but it is even harder if that first draw is
0 cards. And kicking off the second round of an engine is not much easier if you are looking at 9 cards vs 7.
The big thing is that your first hand is a whiff. This means that Ranger will likely cost you a big turn/buy that Smithy would hit. That leads to compound losses.
Say I want to build a Bazaar/draw engine. With Smithy, virtually all my early game Smithy hands buy Bazaars. With Ranger, the first one is a curse hand - highly unlikely to hit $5 and better than even odds of failing to hit $4. The second one might make up for it ... but for the fact that an extra two cards where one is likely copper are unlikely to get me an offsetting gain.
Ranger is good for the +buy. Draw & +buy are two big engine enablers, getting both on one card makes it far more likely that engine is viable (and Ranger is vastly better than Woodcutters or other terminal +buys).
Ranger is also good for when you really need one big hand to set off a megaturn (e.g. a Madman/Csmith megaturn). Or where you need high variance to spike points (e.g. colony money boards). But I highly doubt that your average Smithy engine will ever fall behind your average Ranger engine, particularly if the +buy is not an issue (e.g. it is on the village or the payload as well).