For pete's sake, people.
I'd rather not even get into the accusations of racism.
Dear fandom. Just because you do not like a character does not mean they give nothing to the film.
Yes, I was irritated by Skids and Mudflap. I'm not a fan of the brand of humor they were being used for, and between those two and Wheelie was feeling an overload of a certain type of personality that was pretty much the opposite of what I'd been hoping for.
It would have been nice if the film had gone in a different direction. But within the film we were given, the twins were far from useless. They did actually do a lot. Yes, really. They helped convince Leo to stick with the group. They brought Simmons to where he needed to be. They went up against Devestator and survived and in doing so bought time for the others.
No, I do not think that just slapping a certain other set of twins into the roles would have made any improvement. What if they'd put Sideswipe's and Sunstreaker's names onto Skids and Mudflap without changing anything else from what we got in the film? This is a re-imagining of the entire series. They very well could have done that. In fact, the G1 Skids I remember was a theoretician. Think about that, and be happy that we did get a badass Sideswipe, even if he got almost no screentime.
In short, fandom, if you find the characters annoying, fine. If you find them racist, fine. But if you find them worthless, I'd ask you to take a closer look at your reasoning.