How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Shurrikhan]

By having a design which does not allow for Balancefishing. The reason we fished for Balance was because AST back then was capable of giving people what we now know as Brotherhood, the 5% damage buff, for 15sec, potentially each minute.

That... doesn't actually fully explain Balance fishing -- or rather, even having that did not make constantly Balance fishing optimal.

At the time, even the most oGCD-based job in the game still did nearly 80% of its damage through GCDs and was not misaligned by receiving additional Attack Speed. When it offered new rotational breakpoints, Monks and BLM could actually do slightly more off of Arrow than off of Balance.

Granted, perhaps this comes down partly to semantics.

• If by "balance fishing" you mean only a preference for Balance, while still settling for other cards where it was net optimal to do given the chances for improvement under different conditions (your comp's raid buff timings with which to synergize / time until next raid buff set and density thereof, your comp's use of Arrow, your comp's use of Spear whether you had non-Balance viable single-target recipients to fill with, time until Spread was off CD, number of remaining Redraws, and so forth), then sure.
• But that's rarely been how the term was used then or since, which was nearer to "Get Expand, then throw out anything that's not Balance", even where such was non-optimal (perhaps just because it was easier than actual optimization and it made some people feel better to pretend that was all there ever was or could be).

As I've said previously, the easiest way the devs would have access to, to lower the 'damage variance' of the cards, would be to keep them singletarget and keep Divination as the 'big raidwide partybuff'. Then the cards only need to be balanced as 'Balance contributes this much RDPS, so the other cards should do this much too, but with their own way of applying that damage'. And then once that's done, slap the unique effects on them. Bole gets mit, Ewer gets MP regen, Arrow gets movespeed or something idk. And you wouldn't fish for one over another per se, because you'd still have Seals to play into I'd assume (since the devs seem to love that system).

I feel like this muddles the intent and available utility value of those other cards, though. Especially if still including Seals (which I like for the variance it can add) and Divination, both, it seems unnecessary, given that you could just have a bit more of that total rDPS value end up within Divination and re-tie Divination to one's Seals to ensure that the other cards are mixed in for at least half of one's Play casts.