You are leaning way too hard on that idea of "representative." No single encounter can ever stand in for the huge variety of foes that PCs will face, even at tier 1. Anyone following your approach in this thread would end up with a PC perfectly optimized to face an endless parade of orcs lined up in quartets, and largely unsuited to a real campaign.Because you picked the most unrepresentative creature imaginable to compare with. Nothing is perfectly representative but Orcs are a lot more representative of the types of encounters you will face than helmed horrors (one of the only immune to psychic damage creatures). When you cherry pick and don't even try at a semi-representative comparison then it's not a reasonable example.
As someone running an actual tier 1 campaign with an actual bard in the party who actually uses faerie fire, he gets good work out of that spell. Not always, not in every encounter. But certainly enough to justify his decision to take it. The scenario where the PCs are facing tough enemies who take a few rounds to grind down is quite common. Likewise, large groups of foes (eight to twelve) crop up on the regular. Neither of those situations is covered by the "four orcs" example, and both favor the use of faerie fire over your proposed alternatives.
Can you bring any play experience to this discussion? Or do you just want a white room debate about how to deal with four orcs, utterly unrelated to real games of D&D?