One thing I will say about melee heroes is that they are more about disruption than damage. They need to be very survivable to do their jobs and thus generally use all their mods on that. They also don't do much damage for the first 1-2 turns of a battle.
I'd say this is "mostly" true, but they do end up doing quite a lot of damage once they get the set up. However you do bring a good point, the positioning of your melee hero and knowing when to "melee" is very important. In general you want at least 2 non-melee based "attacks or skills" on your melee based hero. You want a sidearm or grenade or some kind of ranged option, and you also want some kind of support/disruption active skill, equip or mod (at the very least, you can certainly have more).
You want to in many cases, send your melee hero into the fray to do the most damage after the first few turns of battle, when enemy units are hit with CC/staggers, and your melee hero can make the most out of the close quarters engagement. This means that you don't just want to run them directly in, and wait for the opportunity where they will have the most impact. However, having someone standing around doing nothing isn't worthwhile, so you want them to have some options they can use "pre-melee", so that they can be useful for the first 1-3 turns before you set them into the enemy lines.
For mods, I find loadouts that contain 1 mobility mod, 1 survivability mod, and 1 damage mod to be preferable, depending on your faction and secret tech. There are certain skills/equipment that you can get that will change your need for mods (for instance, if you get a mobility skill/equipment then probably don't need a mod), but the point here is that out of your entire skill/equip/mod loadout you want at least 1 mobility option, 1 defensive option, and 1 offensive option, and then you can fill in the rest with what you want to do.
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