I agree with you. I have a bit of experience using SMOTE and one of the things that make me keep using it is its simplicity, and how versatile it is. Just like you, a couple of days ago I wrote a small prototype on how to balance an already synthetic dataset and was very, very satisfied with the results. I'll share it with you in case you are interested,

https://kite.com/blog/python/smote-python-imbalanced-learn-f...