off the top of my head, ogres' unique strengths and weaknesses (good spellcasting but bad school apts, very poor defenses but high damage potential) and the ability to choose anything I want without the annoyances of other races
really there's just an appeal to a unique challenge; ogres fill this quite well, as do mummies. If you want the beefiest and bashiest and easiest you can go with trolls; the biggest problem is apparently everyone keeps getting hung up on the name (so rename ogres if you must).
I'd also like to ask you if you think mummies being generally challenging (no potions) is bad. If yes, why? If no, what's your gripe with ogres specifically, beyond superficial details like name?
Further on name, you
could state that they're particularly squishy in their description (races have descriptions in the selection menu in console, at least, but you have to move the cursor over to see them; there's also the manual, but who reads that (aside from me)?).
Back on buffs, as I see it, it could go three ways:
1) reducing ogres' weaknesses (I strongly disagree here)
2) increasing ogres' strengths, like high hp and damage (I'm fine with this as long as they're still challenging (and don't just turn into slightly wimpier trolls with better spellcasting))
3) giving them wacky gimmicks (I'd really rather it not go this way, but it depends on the gimmick)
(on your specific examples, ddck and mube are too annoying for my tastes and ceee really isn't that bad)
I should also note that ogres are now only recommended for three professions (so arguments irrelevant to these are irrelevant to ogres' strengths/weakness (since crawl only cares about recommended combos being viable), and more specifically, to newbies getting all confused about ogres being bad):
berserker (kills things particularly quickly so it doesn't have to worry as much about defenses, and can go to troll/dragon armours easily, once it finds them; I hear it's pretty good but I haven't tried it myself)
wizard (disabling and surrounding things with summons is nice defensively)
I've won one of these; the early game was easy and by Zot I had enough exp to get a quite broad and powerful spell set (notably the level 6 charm Haste, level 7 translocation Controlled Blink (and of course phase shift), and level 7 Summon Hydra (though I could have gotten Shadow Creatures or Malign Gateway, which are better at trivializing Zot -- I also had 22 levels of Spellcasting, 10 of Hexes and 9 of Fighting (and a tiny bit of Staves), so feel free to put those wherever too))).
Admittedly I also used a broken Tukima's Dance (dancing giant spiked clubs), which is part of the reason why I didn't get those special spells for Zot. To make it interesting, I did zany stuff like early Snake:5 and Tomb (skipped Shoals), and from my past experiences with OgSu, I imagine it would be just fine without broken Tukima's (Summon Hydra, for instance, is really good, but the hydras are a bit squishier than giant spiked clubs) and especially without doing zany stuff.
hunter (large rocks kill things really quickly, making getting to the temple easy; like trhu but an ogre)