What floor are you on? Machete's are just really good because of how fast they with fairly wide arc attacks, fast recovery, closer R1/L1 attack and how high of damage they do because of the combo/stunlock. Nothing wrong with not using them though, it's mainly just a really good choice to give the AI for defense since even though the AI is kind of meh, with machetes they still do pretty well.
Question for you guys, below level 15 or so, what is the best farming route you guys know of? I need to rack up some coins to recover some guys and get some gear. Thus far I've gone solely from scavenging only, but that's starting to seem like a bad idea.