Cynric, I respect you as a MNK. You do a very good job, and it's nice to see how much effort you put into it. I know you said you "play" bard. But do you main it? Do you go in there, as BRD, and work your skills to their utmost, or are most of your observations based on what you've seen? Because I'm flat out telling you, we're fine. Even despite our CC disadvantage, you're missing the one advantage we do have, over any other class except MCH. We are the ultimate chasers. Yes, there's a damage penalty involved, but we can drop WM at the touch of a button, and run down whatever happens to be trying to get away. A large portion of my kills are from gunning someone down as they run for their lives, and we are VERY good at that. When you use a BRDs spike damage to insta-gib a healer, and then turn your focus to another target? You often have two kills immediately after each other.

No, we don't have CC, or defensive CDs, or... The list goes on. But what we do, which is kill things, we do VERY well, even outside of our burst window.