I may have been overly harsh, if the cards were that much more powerful in HW/SB I can understand why it would feel lackluster to have this now, my only prior experience is the EW variant and getting into trouble while I learned to not play it like WHM and to me this is a huge opening of my options. While I can't speak to ultimates - I'm not even a savage player, I did use AST for the new extremes with several groups of randoms and being able to drop Celestial Intersection and Exaltation on one and the second CI with the mit card on the other to address dual tank mechanics felt wonderful, as did following up with an Aspected Benefic on one weaving the regen card for t'other. Similarly being able to use the cards to maintain dps players in all content without breaking my own gravity/malefic spam is neat.

I do kinda get wanting the buff the cards if they are to be a core mechanic. If the old gameplay was closer to the job lore as laid out in it's quests, I feel like I missed out.
I'm not too sure how much room there is for buffs though, just thinking over the potencies of their comparable skills. Even WHM's Divine Benison is only 500 potency of shield without a heal. Which does bring me to one of my first thoughts when I saw how they allocated the cards: 'Why do I get heal buff and shield together and mit paired with regen? It makes so much more sense to have heal buff with the regen and the shield with the mit' I feel like they'd synergise so much better that way. I won't argue against making cards better though, I just don't wanna go back to EW AST, those cards felt pointless to me; yes I got astrodyne and it's nice little buffs every minute and a half, it may just be because I didn't break out of normal content (without unsyncing) in EW that the 6% dps buff would become noticeable but I never did notice it. Maybe there's room for a compromise? They could give us two random cards per 30 seconds rather than three fixed per 60 and bring astrodyne back? I'm not sure how much I'd like that myself but it's an idea from my uncreative brain.

I do agree though about AST lacking in identity. It's kinda like a raid tuned WHM with cards and weaker damage. As a previously mentioned WHM main I feel that's also bland, hopefully they'll do something good in 8.0 but I don't know how much hope I hold for that given the apparent track record. I can only say I think this, like the dungeon/trial difficulty, is a step in the right direction.

Sorry for my initial reaction to this thread, it wasn't very thought through. While our experiences and thoughts clearly differ on the subject, your position makes sense.