Question for those who didn't pick up AST til 5.0 or after.

[Lastelli]

Folks who mained AST were never really "fishing" very often ...

Then they were playing it wrong.
I can accept the lore argument, but card variety was only illusory and that became clear after graduating from "casual AST randomly mashing buttons" to "good AST that tries to play efficiently (albeit in probabilistic terms)".
And no job should have that amount of rdps locked behind a rng mechanic. It was just bad design, plain and simple.