The reason why I prefer screen over minicom is that minicom has a lot of features related to dialling modems and accessing mailboxes, none of which is relevant

The reason why I prefer screen over minicom is that minicom has a lot of features related to dialling modems and accessing mailboxes, none of which is relevant to the case of setting up equipment. A quick screen /dev/ttyS0 115200 beats writing a configuration file, learning another text based stateful UI and working around various instances of your tool trying to be helpful and helping you dialling a modem. Keep in mind that this could be related to the default minicom config my distro shipped back when I was "evaluating" my options, but because screen works totally well for my cases, I've had since zero motivation to go back and give minicom another try.