One of the intresting things about some of the 'lesser' Dire Wolves is that their BV is actualy rather reasonable. It was a lot worse under BV1, when the Prime and B cost less than most Summoners and Timber Wolves, but given what you get there are still some pretty good values out there. The H, for example, offers four heat neutral head cappers with a TC for under three grand. Adding PPCs would cost you a squad of high end BA or half a light mech in BV. The Prime and B still cost about the same as good heavies. Once BV is done away with, we'll see if Summoners don't become more attractive on a cost basis, but as it is most of the under 3k choices look pretty nice.
More over, we can see looking back on this thread here that the Dire Wolf (and many mechs like it to be fair) to get a lot of disrespect. "They don't take any skill." "They're the exclusive choice of munchkins and powergamers and six year olds." "I wouldn't take a Dire Wolf if it were armed with watter canons and I were on fire." (Well, you get the idea.) But, when you look at the B, the H, the X, and some of the others depending on your point of view, you're hardly taking a dream mech. Massed AC2s? Sky high over heats? Heavy lasers? Every difrent sort of missiles? Yes, they're Dire Wolves, which means they are the best Clan slow assualt omni to have (lots of qualifiers there) but they're hardly muched out min/maxed mechs, which makes them more fun to play and more fun to play against. And given how many Dire Wolves there are, we can afford some crazy ones.
Unrelated note, the table below leaves out ultra AC double taps (or at least does them inconsistantly, since they seem to be there averaged out for the B but not the Widowmaker, W, or Promethius) and seems to have some of the missile damage calculated wrong, at least if "max possible damage" is the goal, and not 'average' or 'expected' damage.