Huh. I really haven't had that sort of experience with Reapers - the only times they've given me any trouble is when I haven't actually looked at the enemy's armament and then messed up badly enough to overload in the main firing arc of an enemy onslaught - at which point the reapers really just make death come a bit faster. (Fighting enemies with combat 10 takes some getting used to - it's a whole different ball park than the same ships sans skills. I can kill these things fairly reliably now, but my early attempts often went poorly.)
Similarly, I haven't had the same experience with maulers in vanilla - defensively, I'd much rather face maulers than HVDs, since they do basically nothing to shields. Sure, you have to keep shields up while in range, but that's no different than anything else, and offensively, you can get a lot farther with just kinetic weapons than you can with just explosive - you only need one gun with high per-hit damage to blast through armor, while shields constantly recover.