They should never made Bard. When the new team took over from 1.0, they wanted to bring the FFXI names back. Conjurer > WHM, Thaumaturge > BLM, Marauder > WAR etc.. However Archer > BRD? No.. Kind of a failure right there. They should have make it a Ranger, a pure DPS class. To this day I can't figure out why they chose to make a bard where this game does not support support classes/jobs.

As for the guns part. I think we will see a job which uses guns. So they probably want those weapons for that particular job exclusively. I also hope we will have two jobs coming out of a class eventually, just like Arcanist > SCH/SMN. Maybe there will be enough reason to implement real support jobs and maybe tweak BRD to be more supportive.