I am in the process of dragging Ajantis' terrible ass through early BG right now (no Dex gloves yet) and have put him on bow duty while Branwen does the tanking he was originally supposed to do.
Things should start to look up soon, but ugh. That guy. I've got Quayle in the party as well, and he outperforms Ajantis. Quayle!
Well, the difference between 8 and 15 Dex is one point of AC, so, yeah, it doesn't help much. Minsc's problem really is that 15 Dex doesn't make for a good AC tank, and 15 Con in conjunction with a slow-leveling class doesn't make for a good HP tank, so he keeps chugging those potions.
Also, I have installed Spell Revisions for the first time and, even though I've only seen spells up to level 2 so far, I'm pretty sure it's going to be one of those mods I'll always use from now on. I'm actually switching my spells around quite a lot instead of sticking to my usual routine of "Armor, Sleep, Sleep, Web, Web, go!".