Making a profit on slicing should not be confused with making a genuinely beneficial return on time and resources invested.

If a 35 minute slicing mission returns an average of a 350 credit profit, then I have made ten credits per minute in profit.

• Grinding mobs for saleable junk at character creation returns a better investment than that.
  
• Gathering materials from other professions and selling them on the AH returns more than that.
  
• Crafting low level rudimentary items that are in any sort of demand returns a better investment than that. (i.e. ship parts, commonly used companion items, etc.)
  

If one sends out 3 companions for an hour at that rate of return you receive 1800 credits. This may sound like a lot at level 1, but is not enough to pay my average repair bill at 30.

Depends how you define useless. Or profitable.

 

Do you make money doing it? Yes. Is that money very nice to have? Also yes. Is it a significant amount of funding? Debatable. Are the non-monetary benefits of slicing worth pursuing? Also debatable.

 

Basically, anyone who says that slicing is useless is drastically oversimplifying things...and probably isn't right. Sub-par? Arguable. Not serving its intended purpose as it should? Also arguable. Useless? Uhhhhh...not...really...

 

Edit: If you're asking whether you should start up in slicing at this point, I'd say probably no, if only 'cause there's now a surplus of slicers, and you know what that tends to mean economically.

My own experience with the nerf last night running about 20 slicing missions on various toons is I run a net loss by slicing misisons. I dropped the skill from all but my smuggler who I want to keep it for questing since its leveled descently. I also noticed the random drops are also not yielding the same return as before (nerfed).

I find it sub-par. I also noticed they nerfed the slicing experience granted from slicing in the field. That is freaking terrible. I was not leveling slicing while questing. I took underworld trading on all those toons.

I found they nerfed missions, experience and drop return rates. Pickup another profession.