I've raided with AST in Stormblood, in Edens Gate, Eden's Verse, and I'm currently progging through TEA. I was one of the strongest opponents of the card changes when they rolled out. I didn't read through the entire thread, but I wanted to chime in with my opinion.

After playing around with the class for the changes to the class in the past 2 raid tiers and progressing in TEA, I don't really have concern with the cards anymore. Most people that I see advocating for card changes, just advocate on changing them to other forms of damage increases; I'm not really sure how this is suppose to be more fun. I also, see occasionally people advocating that the bole should be defensive, but I strongly disagree. It's extremely difficult to plan a bole around a specific mechanic due to the random nature of the card, this is why in SB you didn't see ASTs holding out for that ellusive 50% AoE Bole. It just seems that most of the changes being advocated for aren't really any different from how the class is currently being played. To me, it just seems like a lot of effort is being placed on charging a system that won't really make the class more interesting or fun to play. If you give raiders the option between using a defensive CD or a DPS buff, they are going to choose the DPS buff. I know they probably made the changes in Shadowbringers with that in mind.

There are some things that I think need changed though. I believe Sleeve Draw needs a bit more thought and they probably need to rework the seal system to make it more rewarding. Sleeve Draw in it's current iteration feels really bad for a 180s CD ability, I'm not sure why they didn't align this ability with the divination timer. I think the Lord and Lady need to be brought back in a more meaningful way, it was really nice to use minor arcana to get either a healing or damage card. I don't see a reason why we can't have a 8% damage increase assigned to a different ability to free up the minor arcana to start pumping out DPS and healing cards again, perhaps they could be assigned to a different CD. Outside of that, I'm been mostly happy with the changes. Celestial Opposition feels like a meaningful oGCD heal since they made the change way back at the beginning of the expansion. Neutral Sect feels rewarding to use and has a lot of viability. Celestial Intersection always feels meaningful to use in either sect.

One complaint I still have is that they need to give healers something to do during downtime. I'm not really sure why we couldn't get a simply little rotation that combos and maybe gives something like a healing up buff at the end of the combo to reward optimization. At the very least they could give us an extra dot, because as it stands, spamming one button is very very boring when compared to other classes.