All ships in EVE are balanced by give and take, weakness vs. strength, Yin and Yang, good and bad, yada yada yada.. The fail portion of a mach is its tank, without giving up a firstborn for the cost of fittings it would die in a blaze of fire as soon as it got tackled, so to compensate it was made fast as a scalded cat to make it hard to catch.

Unfortunately the weapon system for a Mach works best when sitting still and any movement causes a noticeable drop in tracking and reduces DPS astonishingly bad when using a MWD and only severely bad when using an AB. As a general rule fighting in 50% falloff will lose 20% of your DPS, add acceleration to that and suddenly you find youGÇÖre only doing 20% of your actual DPS at 50% falloff at moderate speeds. Change tactics and close on the target will improve hits but reduce transversal making it easy for an opponent to hit, while the mach is still trying to bleed off angular to hit them. The point being that the reason a mach has 70km of falloff is because it has 20% of its DPS flying into nothing, or glancing off, when it uses any of the speed bonus whatsoever, the same speed everyone wants gimped off it.

The slot layout for a shield mach is silly for PVP with two slots for point and web, one for propulsion mod leaves two for tank, inadequate for all but the most expensive modules, switch to an armour tank and you have thrown away the agility and dps for buffer and tracking but now its a sitting duck waiting to die. Switching to arties and sniper fit is a great idea but the same effect can be accomplished with a Nado for less than the cost of a full cargo hold of ammo.

The training required to max a Mach is daunting for new players with 255 days for core skills, 161 days for gunnery, 99 days for drones, and another 90 days for racial ship skills alone, add any e-war you want and you will spend 2 years perfecting this ship. A cruiser will take you less than half the time to train at most, but after two years of perfecting this ship a player will be well placed to move into Capitals.

The Mach should be left alone because it covers all the training requirements for a superb pilot, it requires learning the tactics for both flying and conflict engagement, it requires learning to fly a non-cap stable fit, using cap like ammo, and ammo like itGÇÖs going out of style, it provides players with a goal that continues to keep accounts active, and players involved. Nerfing it would remove a goalpost for many players with no real up side other than to appease the limited number of haters represented here.

I am confident that CCP is aware of the limitations of a Mach and hopefully they have plans to buff the other pirate faction ships more than Nerf the Mach.