I feel like Bard was not made to the vision of past bards, its definitely true that in the past bards have used bows (and even other weapons) but in FF games they all had a huge focus on music when it came to abilities. SE's new Bard has a huge focus on archery. I don't hate the Bards, and Yoshida has right to re-envision Jobs (producer ftw) but I don't think it's surprising some people would be miffed, like changing Dante's person in Devil May Cry lol.
Similar reasons why I didn't think bard was captured Summoner missed out on the visuals, or even semi-epic visuals. To be fair it's hard to get the gameplay right to a particular crowd because SMN has been a bit of everything, but still the visuals have been incredibly consistent "awesome" and sure there is some limitations in multiplayer games but we didn't need to go this far from awesome. Opinion, of course - that they don't look "awesome". Assuming SE saw warlock as some influence it feels weird then if you compare the Warlock's pets to ours as you'd see ours lack variety and fearsome or powerful presence-- compared to a graphically inferior game (imo), compared to SE who loves to do over the top stuff (I thought..), compared to SE's summoner who is almost always the most over the top featurette when available. I understand wanting to scale down from full primal (would become screen filling nonsense), I don't understand going as far as they did - from first sight it wasn't love, lol. Good news is that it "appears" they've had at least minor changes- seen via benchmark ('appears'), ifrit-egi the best looking egi (imo) appeared to be bukier and a bit bigger.
Don't hate either, never really been crazy bard player so I just see it as a small change of theme and not a change of a class I previously loved to play, but playing SMN it did constantly itch at my mind that my minion looked silly and It caused me to stray away from it in the end.