It was done because we BLM gained an unfair advantage. Sure, Fire I kept you within the GCD, but what about everything else? The bug allowed abuse of Flare, which wasn't what Flare was supposed to be. Fast-cast Flares while under the influence of Astral Fire were extremely overpowered. Before I got my Relic I was doing over 500 DPS easily with just an Ifrit weapon with only 3 monsters. There were relic tanks that still found it hard to keep agro from me.

We were overpowered, no matter how you look at it. We're still extremely strong and when it comes to AoE, we're still king. We just aren't stronger than the game intended for us to be.

The reason the change came now, of course, is because it would make PvP extremely unfair. It was going to happen and anyone that didn't see it coming really shouldn't be mad because you don't seem to have a good idea of what balancing should be. Go make a Monk if you want to be the strongest ST and stay BLM if you want the strongest AoE class.

As for Bards, I'm still finding it hard to figure out why they're still complaining... The only way they should be mad is if the changes to the tooltips of a couple of skills is correct and not a mistake, which is what a lot of people believe from testing. You're still the only class that's impossible to swap out and you're still the DPS that is almost required for the entire end-game content. No one wants to run without Bards.

Also, tanks often run out of TP in long fights. Tell them to inform you when they need more TP and you're fine. There's also the fact that you can still attack fine while moving. If they nerf your damage to 50% while moving, then be mad, but until then you can't really complain about such a small difference to your play-style. The Bards I run with can't figure out what the big deal is as they play almost the exact same without having to cast RoD, which they're happy about.

I do, however, agree that balancing PvP shouldn't ruin PvE. Instead of ignoring PvE, clone the skills and move them over to PvP and THEN balance them. PvE skills don't have to be effected to make PvP better (and let's face it, PvP is a huge mess right now).