Making the Contingency Planner more useful
I assume that your gaming group typically plays with 4 players.  I have found the contingency planner to be much worse with 4 players than with 2.  I agree that the contingency planner is the worst role, but part of that is because of how variable his power is depending on how the event cards fall.  Throwing him out is a reasonable approach if you only have the base game, but the other option is to buy "On the Brink".  It includes a bunch of new event cards, so you switch to playing with 2 event cards in the deck per player (8 with 4 players instead of the usual 5), and I found that this really balanced out the Contingency Planner with the other roles.  With a higher number of event cards being drawn (and therefore being put in the discard pile), he has a much longer list of options on a given turn.