Underwhelming according to whom?
I would have gone with 185/70/16 if such a tire existed. But it doesn't that I could find, 205 is about as narrow as you can go in 16" wheels and have some options for profile and brand and overall design.
The narrower tire was a major point of the upgrade because it's hard to find narrower tires in larger wheel sizes. They should indeed have less rolling resistance.
What they will *not* have is less friction in terms of traction, at least not to the degree people mistakenly seem to believe. The formula for static friction has no term for surface area. It's just the coefficient of friction and the amount of force acting on it. In other words, larger contact patches do not translate to more traction automatically. Rather, the increased traction largely results from the softer compounds of "performance tires." So then you go to an all season-compound on a wide tire on a large wheel and you get 1) more weight 2) stiff sidewalls that are instable over rough sections 3) worse performance in terms of fluid dynamics-- passing through air, water, and snow.
Moreover, for a given amount of contact patch surface area, a longer narrower patch is preferable to a shorter wider one for my purposes. Short and wide is preferable on track days with high corner loads on a dry traction surface. For civilian car usage on public roads in varying weather conditions, tall and narrow is a better choice. As it is for straightline drag racing and it is for many offroad scenarios as well.