I agree that kennels are very underwhelming, and I'm rarely interested in building them even in big teamgames. I have an idea for a redesigned kennel that should give it an interesting use case in both 1v1s and teamgames.
This is a bit of a wild idea, but I am in favor of giving the kennel drones a build suite same as the UEF ACU drone. This is a complete role change—instead of being used for build power, they functionally become a flying engineer. That way, they can go around the map, build forward factories, radar, pd, and grab reclaim. I think they would need a much higher energy cost to produce in order to balance them. I think it would be good to also require the kennel to actually produce the first drone instead of getting it for free (each kennel can hold one drone, and if it is killed it must be rebuilt).
I can imagine this drone having a use case even in 1v1s; you might build a single kennel to produce a rover drone once you hit t2 to contest plateaus or grab reclaim in hard to reach places (e.g. badlands plateau, regor plateau, open palms tree reclaim etc.). It's balanced by the fact that you need to first produce a t2 engineer, then produce a kennel building, and then produce a drone—and also the fact that it can be shot down easily with interceptors. In later game you might want to use kennels to grab reclaim around the map, but it's energy cost should be prohibitive to the point where it's always cheaper to build transports + normal engineers than kennel drones.