Range is a none issue if you place your effigy properly on the beginning of a fight, even if it means to walk into melee range with SoD before pull like melee do.
It also does not require you to keep all your dots on it, just Agony. Currently, you are not using SE for its damage, you did before MG was a thing and we would all played WiA, but now you just use it for its superior shards generation and the damage it deals is just a bonus.
It is much much more fun to play with enough souls to drop 3 to 4 UAs into a cycle rather the 1-2 you usually get with SC.
Keeping agony on effigy alone gives about the same amount of shards you would generate by having agony on 2-3 additional targets because it does not cause or effected by DR. The only fight SC is close to it, is Tych and it is mostly because of a bug.
Ah, and m+, SC is better at M+.