I was an Artifice. I leveled all the way through with it. I got to 50 and was so excited that I would be able to craft great lightsabers and awesome rare crystals. The lightsabers were lacking however since one new raid weapon would easily replace anything you could put in there, thus lightsabers were dead. As many others I quickly began doing dailies to get my earpieces and implants, and quickly found that the mods from the dailies were better than any I could make, thus mods were dead. Rakata Relics, the most useful thing to us, I crit crafted 2 with augment slots and that was the most it has done for me. However with 1.2 you can buy better than the relics with dailies, and thus again relics were dead. The one thing that I thought I would always have the edge on, color crystals. I thought there was no way they could take away the rarity of my crystals. I quickly came to realize that the only rare color was magenta. And then 1.1.5 hit and everybody could buy better crystals than I could make, thus crystals were dead.
1.2 gave me little hope, but the idea that I could RE lightsaber and offhands and craft with augments was exciting. However when I began to think about it, thats only 2 things. If I switch to synthweaving I could get 5... This caused me much dilemma and you can ask my guild mates i spent hours contemplating whether to switch. They gave no incentive to keep artifice. I switched and I don't regret it. Unless they release crystals strictly to artifice there will never be use for it.
I hope that this gave you some insight to what a real artifice who was conflicted what to do felt. I got 400 synthweaving in one day because of left over mats from artifice. I spent 150k credits and have all the schematics for battlemaster and war hero. You know what I could buy for artifice? Nothing. Good luck deciding what is right for you.