I suck at this game but whatever little I understand makes me love bulky too. I had a run where I just kept shackles on one of my monsters the entire time and by the time I got bored at around loop 16 (amazing for me unfortunately), 4 of them had 4k hp and at least a thousand strength. Since I really relied a lot on shackles and had a lot more strength than def, bulky 2 helped me almost as much as bulky 3
my bulky team just exploded against some enemy team on loop 19, some reflect abillity or something I think, normally if you do the non infinity mode the best was always to go for 3 fully evolved monster if you got problems with that, last year all you had to do prior to the nerf was use a tuskal to beat hard