Are you sure you can’t use it? Have you looked to see if the state changes on any of the entities when you push a button?
As far as I know (I don’t have a mini-mote but I have other battery powered z wave devices) “initializing” is a normal state and shouldn’t effect the operation. I have 8 total battery powered z wave devices and they all say “initializing(CacheLoad)” pretty much all the time.