In regards to whether or not she is a budget Contessa, she is not. What she has is timing, not omniscient precognition. It's why she stumbled to some degree whenever Joe showed her something new, and why Joe was even able to hit her in the first place because Contessa would've been nowhere near that fight if she had been the one he was fighting. And you underestimate how much of a power multiplier the ABB had been for her plans, not just the capes. True, Bakuda gave her the conscripts as well as the weapons to deal a lot of damage, but the real kicker of her plan had been the fact that she had the manpower to cause chaos to an entire city, thereby forcing Joe to reveal more of his cards that he would've liked. Same goes for the collateral damage caused.
Honestly, if she had joined the E88 instead, she would've not been able to do as much as she did. The Empire is basically the group of powerhouses to the ABB's utility capes. The cloning, the Tinker bombs and weaponry, and the big threat to the entire city that was Lung gave her the tools she needed to distract and hoodwink Joe, and the E88 thugs wouldn't have had the ticking bomb threat in their heads considering Kaiser would've never agreed to that kind of thing.
All in all, people kind of overestimate March by quite a bit. She's definitely a bigger threat than anyone else in the Bay true, by her sheer Thinker potential, but the biggest threat to her was never her power because there are actual ways to work around it. Just limit her information and prevent her from coordinating things. Even her Sting could be avoided as long as one didn't approach her and she didn't have the convenient payload delivery ala-Oni Lee.
The real threat to her was the information she held over the Shardspace, and the interactions capes had with said Shardspace.
