So I had initially wrote this up in response to another comment but the more I think about it I think it's worth making a post about in hopes that Klei or someone else can come up with some solution. While she comes off as quite strong she's actually quite lacking when you compare her to other follower characters who are more versatile with their followers. Basically this is to say Wurt needs some better interactions with her followers and a better payoff for all the work it takes to fully make use of them hopefully without just copying the best aspects of Maxwell and Webber if possible. I do plan to brainstorm some ideas later but I want to see where you guys stand on this topic or if you all have some ideas for improvement.
Here's what I wrote in the comment:
I'd argue the biggest weakness of Wurt as a character is most of what she offers is done better by other characters for much less effort.
Maxwell's gathering ability is superior right out of spawn and even after she fully establishes herself he's still the superior gatherer. His followers are always around and usable when he needs them and will prioritize the tasks their given while also allowing him a greater degree of control over them via emotes. He doesn't need to worry about his followers getting wiped in a fight and going to recruit them again. He doesn't have to worry about leaving followers behind when moving between shards or logging out for a moment. He doesn't have to worry about the tedium of keeping his followers fed or them running away from him while he's trying to feed them. ( PLEASE KLEI FIX THIS!!! Or at the very least increase the shared feeding range on normal merms to be the range of merm guards...)
Then there's Webber the other primary minion character his followers can't do tasks like shadows and merms however they more than make up for it by being far more relaxed and safe in terms of minions. Unlike Maxwell or Wurt his minions lack a maintenance cost after the initial feeding so they'll guard you for as long as they live which is often nearly forever when you have nurses around as there's not a whole lot of enemies in the game who can outdamage a nurse's healing meaning of the 3 his followers are the most durable in most scenarios. Being able to pick his followers up means moving between shards is less than a issue. Expanding on being able to pick them up it also means you can make better use of hats on them like for example giving a shattered spider a miner's hat to have hands free light making use of their fast movement speed to keep up with you or a spitter's ranged attack to kill birds or aggro cowardly mobs by animation canceling a boomerang. He also has a far greater level of control and influence over spiders than either Maxwell or Wurt via his whistle which makes them prioritize his orders and his healing goop which he can use to directly heal his minions even without nurses. Also being able to pick them up means that it's not hard to move them between shards when your traveling.
Maxwell offers fast, efficient, and cheap labor with no hoops to jump through.
Webber offers a more relaxed follower experience with a much greater degree of control where the followers feel more like mini survivors rather than mindless minions
Wurt on the other hand asks a lot of you the player to use her followers effectively while giving you a strong sense of helplessness while using them sometimes. They can chop and mine resources but there's no stopping them unless you move too far from them which also means you need to babysit them while they work to an extent and they won't work unless you have the specific tool and show them what you want done. Another problem is that once they start fighting you can't stop them unless you run far enough that they get teleported away from what they were fighting. As already mentioned making use of the shared feeding ability of merms on normal merms is very hard since they run away from you while trying to feed them and this can lead them spreading out to far to benefit however this can be somewhat fixed when you get guards as their recruitment range is far bigger.
That's not to say merms don't come with a few unique advantages however like having passive hp regen, merms being naturally protective of Wurt, or their upgraded variants being immune to panic but more often than not if your looking for a follower character the work you need to put into Wurt just doesn't pay off when looked at side by side with Maxwell or Webber which is the main reason those two tend to be far more popular.
Thematically Wurt is really fun but the end result on her doesn't really respect the time you invest into her.