I'd agree that a more musically inclined bard would not be a bad thing. But People need to understand why the team decided to go this route.

Bard as it is in FFXIV is basically a straight up fusion of the FFXI ranger and bard class. As a long time FFXI player, it is very apparent to me why they thought this pairing would be a good idea.

A lot of players in FFXI had bard as a job, but few actually made bard their main job. Why? Because it was boring to play. the running joke among the player base was that people who got bard to max promptly lied about having it afterwards because no one wants to play the job. It was for pure support and pulling. And while it had its fair share of nuances, it never had the satisfaction of actively seeing its effects on the target directly. You rarely see the bard pull out its daggers to engage in combat. Bard's whole gameplay centered on running back and forth between the melees and mages playing songs in a rotation.

Ranger suffered from a different problem. As a damage dealer that required range for effective accuracy, it made the melee weapons they equipped useless other than stat bonuses. As a job, it was static. Rangers found a spot to stand and then just shot arrows from that position non-stop. The job required almost no movement at all during combat. There is already a job that plays this way: BLM. There's no reason to have another.

The answer was to combine the two jobs so that you had a ranged damage dealer that also had the capacity to enhance teammates based on location. This allowed the bards to both help other players and also feel satisfaction by actively dealing damage and using weaponskills, while also giving ranger players some incentive to stay mobile during combat.

Pure support classes are usually made out to be incredibly good due to their need of having to beat out a DD or healer for a spot in the party. But this has the side effect of them being almost a necessity in endgame content. I'm sure the FFXIV team wanted to give the player base more choice in party composition, so they allowed the bard to also take on some DD duties, and therefore have less reliance on songs. Ifrit and Mog fights do not require bards for this reason. And even garuda fights do not require bards because of their godly songs, but rather for their ranged plume control.

I for one support the team's decision to have combined these classes. And if they do add additional songs and animations and even instruments to the job... great! But I hope the underlying principle remains. The jobs are designed to be fun to play, while also allowing player choice and job variety. Don't lose that.