Herzog, I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing that your problem player is disregarding the primary rule of psionics: Thou Shalt Not Spend More Power Points On One Manifestation Than Thy Manifester Level. The most common reason people think psionics are broken is along the lines of "My 3rd level psion is spending 20 PP on his
mind thrust and dealing 20d10 to everyone he hits!" when said 3rd-level psion cannot spend more than 3 PP on a power without being a wilder or having Overchannel.
-The Psionicist (Shaper) uses Touch Sight to trump any and all forms of invisibility employed by our opponents.
Forms of seeing through invisibility include, but are not limited to: blindsight, touchsight, scent, tremorsense, lifesense, mindsight, and touchsight. There are many ways to gain these extra senses--several summonable monsters have scent, Mindsight is a feat, Hearing the Air is a ToB stance to let you detect invisible things, etc. Touchsight is unique to psionics, but not unique in its utility.
On the DM's side of things, point out the Darkstalker feat to him. It lets you hide from special senses as normal, and though it doesn't explicity protect against touchsight or several other senses, he could easily rule it to do so.
-The Psionicist uses psionic Vigor to have a seemlessly unending supply of temporary hp (in other words: preemptive self-healing)
As temporary HP don't stack, at any one time he could have 5*ML temp HP up, and he has to spend a standard action to restore them if he takes too much damage; with the number of PP you're running through if you want to do this, it's not nearly as effective as one would think if you're playing by the rules.
-The Psionicist creates astral constructs that are of equal strength of the Warforged Fighter or better. While the same could be said for some summoned monsters, normal anti-summoning precautions (such as protection from evil) don't work on these since the are not summoned, but created, requiring a dispel magic/psionic to get rid of
Astral constructs of your level aren't as good as a PC (and don't have the utility of summons, to boot), so if he's outfighting a warforged fighter, he's probably spending too many PP.
-The Psionicist (Shaper) gets Fabricate as a lvl 4 power, while even the Artificer (a class build around crafting things) needs to obtain it as a lvl 5 infusion.
Metacreativity powers tend to be lower-level than similar spells (for instance,
minor creation is a 1st-level shaper power), but even a sorcerer gets
fabricate before an artificer, so it's not really a mark against psionics but against the artificer in this case.
However, since I have also seen a psionicist working with no power-issues whatsoever in a party, I'm guessing it's a matter of an optimised build in a group that may not always choose the most optimised combinations.
Like I said, it might also be simply misreading the rules. Granted, I assume you're not a combat-focused artificer, so between you and the fighter, it's not surprising that a full caster is doing better, but I'd check on the rules issue just in case.
However, the fact that this is possible, and the issues that arise, suggest to me that in designing the psionic rules, the designers looked at the various types of psionics possible, giving them certain advantages and disadvantages relative to eachother, but (IMO) took insufficient time to evaluate how these abilities related to arcane or divine equivalents, leading to several situations where psionics is, without a doubt, better, in an area where the arcane/divine class should excel!
In other areas, (like self-buffing and self-healing) the ability is, indeed, limited to the psionicist himself instead of applying to the entire party, but seen from the point of the character this is not a restriction.
1) The only thing psionics really does better than Vancian magic is blasting; pretty much everything else is only a splatbook away.
2) You're giving the designers too much credit.
