Min/Max Boards

I really like what I'm seeing for psionics (if I'm reading it right, inertial armor is really boss), but I'm not convinced that - mechanically speaking - an artificer/wizard gestalt is any worse than an artificer/psion. In many respects, the opposite seems true: for instance, metamagic has to be taken twice in order to be able to apply it to both sides of the gestalt progression, right? You lose most of the artificer's ability to hit the panic button and piss flaming gold if all of your metamagic feats are going towards your psi stuff.

Is the psion simply better than the wizard? Because their chassis is identical and the artificer/wizard stuff doesn't so much overlap as reinforce each other. I'm trying to stay unbiased here, but I realize I really lack knowledge about psionics so tell me if I'm completely off base here with my interpretation.

And yes, I definitely considered the warlock. Not just for the artificer, because the idea of a warforged juggernaut/warlock gestalt was really, really, REALLY tempting because even with the ridiculous ASF on the adamantine body you could just grab all the 24 hour stuff and invoke every morning until you got it and then you'd have a flying spiky ball of death doing dungeon crasher fighter + warforged juggernaut shit all day long until someone did a dispel. Might even add some laser beams if you were feeling optimistic and go all War Machine.

Not optimized, necessarily, but still! Awesome!

Warlock artificer seems really fun (and taking 10 at level 4 is sweet since artificer you have to wait till 13), but still objectively worse than taking artificer/wizard? You'd wind up with the same chassis as an artificer/wizard only without the artificer/wizard's versatility.

Level 5, play-by-post Eberron campaign, first time playing gestalt. Actually, to be honest, I think it's my first D&D 3.5 campaign (don't be totally alarmed, I've played some pathfinder. Actually, no wait, that one is falling through so this is - yup, if it actually gets off the ground, my first campaign. Please be kind to my errors of interpretation and tendency towards pedantry).

So I rolled my character's stats and they are an unimpressive :

15 15 12 10 10 8

Basically everyone else in the campaign has a) higher b) more balanced stats - I believe the next lowest is 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9 while the high end is something like 18, 17, 15, 12, 12, 9 <= SO JEALOUS DANG, that's like what, mid-40s point buy?) so I could really use some advice as to how to remain effective given the stat discrepancy. I'm strongly considering Artificer/Wizard despite the book-keeping and the fact that my character would have only one good save, a d6 hit die and 3/4 BAB progression because while Int 16 Con 17 Dex 12 Cha 8 Wis 8 Str 8 is a reasonable-ish Wizard build, it's kind of terrible for anything vaguely approaching a martial build.

(for those not in the know, warforged have +2 con, -2 wis, -2 cha and are sweet-ass living robot people. But if I could choose again I'd go with a shifter ranger/druid or barbarian/druid gestalt becamse omnomnom cheese)

Any advice would be sorely appreciated! Duskblade was suggested, but I'm not really seeing its redeeming qualities, might as well just go full fighter and pick up more the more useful passive fighter stuff like warforged racial sub for the first level (battle hardened gets you an untyped +3 bonus to initiative and fear saves), improved initiative for fighter feat 2 for a meaty +7 to initiative right out of the gate without any tricky item stuff at all.

(I guess the slightly more martial stat assignment would look: Int 16 Con 14 Dex 8 Cha 8 Wis 8 Str 15 or the same except Dex and Str switched)

But the wizard/artificer build is really tempting right now since no matter which direction I go, I'm pretty sure I have to dump charisma and that kind of hurts the UMD checks. Advice! Cost/benefit analyses! Postcards! Well wishes! Pity! Rueful anecdotes! I'll accept it alllllll.