People are already killing susano in 8 minutes (even less than 6 minutes for the best groups), and the fight enrage is at 10 minutes (not sure, my slowest kill was 9:30ish). For a normal farm there's absolutely no need for certain compositions. If you're doing savage progression aiming to clear fast, or doing speedkills, then yeah bard is (currently) absolutely better than machinist. If you have trouble with getting into PF groups, have you tried using DF?

If it makes you feel any better, the number of clears of bards vs machinists (you can see on fflogs) should be enough to make the devs notice that something is wrong with machinists. We don't know they'll "fix" the job, but we can expect some changes to come next tuesday.