It's funny to see this thread still going when it was literally made when they first announced Wanderer's Minuet. There's a great deal we know now that we didn't then, and to tell the truth it's not as bad as it seemed. You can't weave 2 off-global cooldown abilities anymore, but you can still weave one per cast and Barrage was indeed changed so that your next skill is tripled instead of it affecting auto-attack. Empyreal Arrow and Sidewinder hit insanely hard for a Bard, so at least they did give us abilities that could put out the extremely high damage values. All in all, I actually believe that the Bard's freedom of movement actually made them way too easy to play (I just recently gave an example of killing an enemy 10 levels higher than me just because I could kite it). If anything, the class has become more complex, but at the very least the job as a whole is much more satisfying to master.

Like it or not, Wanderer's Minuet is needed to keep up respectable damage, and just because we can't make figure 8's while we dps doesn't mean that the class is any less fun or interesting.