How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Shurrikhan]

I think this is the problem, but it's super hard to fix. If we give people SB AST cards, how can we be sure there won't be people advocating for Balance fishing? We can't. And there almost certainly will be such people. The question is how to deal with it.

We don't have to be sure there won't be. And, if like the previous case where Balance fishing 24/7 was generally non-optimal and therefore a position held only by the less informed... just ignoring them is generally fine.

Heck, instead of leaving the Card system in a tuning state worse than in pre-HW (Stormblood's), we might actually even *gasp* give it a semblance of balance, and if the myth persists thereafter... woe be them. The math would be there for those who don't want to settle for a gross oversimplification.

Something I once saw a person say was (paraphrasing) that the reason we have homogenization and simplification and all the other stuff people now complain about is because of people asking for it.

While that's true for certain things, there's at least as much for which it really isn't; the complaints just did not have enough in common with the reasons the devs gave for the action and/or who/what would actually benefit from the changes to say that it's even a sort of Monkey's Paw outcome, unless the reason for the corrupted wish would be that the spirit housed in the severed paw was both hard of hearing and had a prior agenda.