(minions-mode 1) did not appear to be working for me because I modified my mode-line via customize and start my emacs as a daemon using emacsclient -a "".

I presume that setq-default in the define-minor-mode is not compatible with customize. I'm not sure what the solution is. I'm out of my depth trying to work out what would behave better default-set-variable wasn't it.

Obviously I can work around it by not using customize. Thank you for the package. Not only does it clean up my modeline it speeds up my startup quite significantly as I was using delight which seems remarkably slow.