Perhaps you’re the exception, but I’m fairly sure that the reason why most people liked bomb mining so much was because it was ridiculously faster and cheaper to mine for gems with them compared to hammer mining.
A top-notch forged diamond hammer with 3x3 aoe was laughably slower, had a much worse yield, and lasted a lot less, than an equally well-forged bag of topaz bombs. Would you disagree that there was a heavy imbalance there?
One of the most viewed topics seems to support that notion: