Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Valence]

MCH was pretty popular on HW, but it's popularity was probably heavily tied for being part of the best (and only) top raid compo back in time : WAR, DRK, AST, SCH, NIN, DRG, BRD, MCH.
It's kinda strange : bow and gun mage were heavily turned down but performances were here so played.

I however wonder how people can think EW BRD to be the worst iteration as it stricly better than ShB one :
- Loss of many bloodletter/rain due to having one charge, so full CD reset hardly happen and double proc were wasted.
- Need to apply DOT on target in case of mutlti target situation.
- Having dot to roll in not better than having a song active.
- Not being buffed by it's own party abilities.
- Being a 80s rotation job which never/poorly align with standard 2/3min party cd, and never with reopener at 6min.

As a Bard player and main right now I do think they had the gist of what was wrong with previous bard which was heavy clipping issues due to empyreal + unreliable procs that would make your repertoire overflow and waste way too many procs (much like monk has always had with chakras but actually worse). On top of it bloodletter still didn't have any charges even in shb. I also understand why they wanted to go away from the crit based procs after SB since it went out of hands.

But I guess my problem with it is how they solved it, as usual. It felt watered down, or in the case of dots for EW, outright nuked.

- I actually like the idea of a job relying on a substat to get procs or special benefits. The problem is that bard (and monk) was the only one in SB and combined with poor itemization control (anybody remember the omegalulfire gun of alphascape compared to the bow?), it naturally made the job impossible to balance out in the later stages of a savage tier. I'm not gonna cry too much over it though, although I wished all jobs relied more on this instead of none, because substats besides speed right now really feel useless (and I could honestly not even be surprised if SE decides someday to remove them altogether, like they removed main stats out of the picture).
- The fact that dots meant getting procs was fundamental for the dots to feel meaningful.
- Being able to literally spamm rain of death during AoE was super fun.
- We used our MP for something (foe requiem and manasong)

Now then, the points you make, I actually definitely agree with, and i'd even add a big one: the current gauge charges during downtime, which is a huge gain for the job viability.