@Wuhrframen. I was about to post pretty much the same when i saw your post.
By a strange coincidence I found the last piece of Achilios' set a couple of days ago and gave the set a spin through Teganze last night. It was really good. It was about the same as AetherXis for speed and safety.
I keep all the summons up and I found that they survived better with the set than with other combinations (not sure why as yet) which is helpful since my barb merc doesn't seem as 'indestructible' as other people seem to find.
Like you, I've had no luck crafting Stingers and I've not found much that's useful so my gear was still largely TU4 apart from a runeword xbow (Tartarus has highest dps, AetherXis less damage but with avoid) so it may not be a fair test for me to switch from that gear to the set, but I'm not yet 125 to do the next set of ubers and try to farm Fauztinville.
So if anyone can't get the SUs recommended in the guide, the set is a good alternative, the only issue is that it drops about 17% life leech for me - so down to about 27% - and some mana leech loss but it's not a massive problem (I use wormtongue belt with the set).
One thing that helps with leech is that I find the 1 point in DS actally kills faster than maxed widowmaker once you have corpses and it doesn't seem to need line-of-sight. When I start popping DS, leech is faster/better as well.
Nova Shot from the set xbow is actually quite a good killer - the downside is that it doesn't leech. But I put it on LMB just in case I want to use it if I need 360 degrees of damage, like when I'm surrounded.