Uhmm did you play Lonesome Road or read the logs? ED-E has no AI, and he was sent out int othe wasteland because the Enclave wanted to dismantle him and his creator had grown attached to it and didn't want to "kill" him, his mission is a phony one, deviced just to get him away from the hands of the Enclave.
I specifically said he 'should have had' AI, and didn't, making him even less compelling.
And no, I never pursued ED-E past the vanilla game's arc. But that really doesn't change much, does it? You're still sending a data-packed and more or less defenseless bot (shown both in the cutscene where it's shot down, and in-game where it utterly blows) cross-country where it is conveniently ignored by a great many people for a considerable length of time. You don't even find it in the hands of powerful people trying to figure it out, or out in the deepest depths of the wastes: You run into it on some old guy's desk in a random town, being told that it's been there since "a while back." All of this in a universe where Enclave Vertibirds are now legend, and the NCR hunts down Enclave members with laser precision. That doesn't strike you as being pretty weak? It's on par with Daisy Whitman explicitly and openly using the word "Vertibird" when describing her piloting experience, while simultaneously refusing to state whom she flew it for, making the deduction simple enough for a chimpanzee.