Not going to elaborate much because everything has pretty much been said multiple times by a LOT of people by now.
What's nice is that our localization team HAS some feedback power unlike most other companies.
“We are truly sorry about the initial issues with the feel of the job. That said, card effects were changed to their current iteration because we received feedback from all regions that players did not want "useless cards." It does indeed lower the feeling of "drawing a good card," but if we make certain cards significantly more powerful than others, then we'll just return to fishing for the good ones, so we decided to simplify it. We plan on continuing with this style for now.” -YoshidaP
Yoshi has been amazing for all this time but no one is perfect.
"better" cards lead to an imbalance yes, but what we call a perfect imbalance.
By creating a scenario more powerful than any other (AoE balance) you effectively break the cards balance (god the puns, why). But that is, surprisingly, a GOOD thing.
What in the name of Godbert? How is this a good thing?
You see by being aware of a First Order Optimal Strategy (FOOS, aka AoE balance in this case) players are ALWAYS going to be fishing for it. But, they will not get it all the time. And that my friends, is EXACTLY where master astros will shine compared to good astros.
Some people feel it frustrating and sadly it was their inexperienced voices that were heard. Because when you really think and math it out, giving a +4.3% DPs increase for 30 secs instead of +5% isn't THAT big of an issue.
But people were told that AoE balance was THE best, THE only thing you wanted. While it wasn't wrong, they probably never knew how little of a difference getting an AoE spear made rather than an AoE balance on the overall 10 mins DPs race.
This perfectly imbalanced scenario created this wonderful thing where people who were good as their astro could really be put apart from those who MASTERED their astro. Static mates legitimately asked me if I was hacking because of the ridiculous amounts of AoE balances I was throwing out and they'd NEVER seen that in their lives.
The answer was really easy, I'm an analytic person. A quick one at that. I would draw a card and instinctively pick out the best choice based on hundreds (ok maybe dozens) of possible present and future scenarios within 0.68 seconds and not miss a GCD while putting the card in its right place and immediately reset the draw CD.
Same could be said of sleeve draw where I'd instantly analyze those 3 or 4 empty slots now full with a random card and sort them out to get that sweet sweet AoE balance, all the time.
That came with a year of practice and countless experimentations and forum researches and so on. I had MASTERED the class and people FELT it.