I enjoy that the new MCH has flexibility but I feel like the price for that has been too great in terms of how rewarding the class feels to play.

With the old machinist you were always rewarded with a big payoff every minute for keeping your rotation on track, even if you didn't feel very powerful between WF/Overheat phases it felt meaningful to do so. Very methodical gameplay, easy to get a grasp of but had a lot of potential for minmaxing when you get into the nitty gritty of specific bosses. It always felt like you were building towards that tasty nugget of damage at the end of your rotation. It had a lot of flaws but it still grew on me after a while if you disregard the inconsistent Overheat timings when playing with less than optimal latency.

The new MCH fixed a lot of the issues that the old iteration had. It's way, way less risky to mess things up and lose your alignments because of a single wrong press of a button due to how flexible the new heat mechanic is. It's also way, way, way less rewarding to play due to such a big portion of our damage being slapped on press and forget abilities like Drill and AA/Queen. Like many others have said, Hypercharge doesn't feel very impactful to use, it went from being the window that defined our damage to being something that is just used to weave together the gaps between our "big red button" skills. I can only speak for myself of course, but having damage handouts in the forms of single button presses is very boring and unrewarding. Ricochet and Gauss Round spam is pure button bloat. I'd much prefer if they were double the potency and twice the cooldown to make them feel more strategic to use.

TL;DR: Too many buttons to press for the sake of feeling more busy, feels unrewarding to play, no setup needed for Hypercharge other than making sure AA/Dr are on cooldown already. MCH feels much more like a rhythm game where you smash buttons as they come up even though technically it's less so than it was before. PS. remove the weird cooldown indicator for AA/Dr, just put them on cooldown like other skills, it's redundant and makes it difficult to see.