Bard procs have little impact on damage variability

[Valence]

Obviously it's intentional. SE has long tried to keep jobs balanced (by their metrics, not players').

In fact, I would argue this is why they changed BRD procs to be a fixed proc rate as opposed to being influenced by crit, which they were in the past. That meant you could literally increase the proc rate by stacking crit. To a certain extent, you can still increase the procs on many jobs indirectly by stacking Skill/Spell Speed, because the faster GCD means more rolls at trying to trigger a proc over, say, a 10 minute duration, but in many cases this is deemed not as good as just stacking Crit, DH or Determination.

Hot take but I wish all jobs had some manner of enhancing their gameplay loop by letting players the possibility to stack certain things favoring this or that. Building everything around crit on BRD felt good once you could feel that everything procced like there was no tomorrow, something that MNK still has by the way, albeit to a lesser degree. The game has made everything it can to remove building agency away from player's hands.
It also had another hidden benefit which was to make the job more and more involved to play as the post endgame expansion came along, since you'd get more and more procs as you geared up between tiers.

[Carighan]

Hot take but I wish all jobs had some manner of enhancing their gameplay loop by letting players the possibility to stack certain things favoring this or that. Building everything around crit on BRD felt good once you could feel that everything procced like there was no tomorrow, something that MNK still has by the way, albeit to a lesser degree. The game has made everything it can to remove building agency away from player's hands.
It also had another hidden benefit which was to make the job more and more involved to play as the post endgame expansion came along, since you'd get more and more procs as you geared up between tiers.

The problem with this is that there is then no player agency of choice. There is - and always will be - an optimal choice, and you just stack that.

[Valence]

Agency may have been the wrong word. But this doesn't make my points wrong. It feels genuinely good to feel that the crit you gear up for and meld materia for actually has an effect on your gameplay in battle, and that it also progresses throughout the whole post expansion. It also motivates me frankly a lot more to go for gear than just "making funny interchangeable substat number go up".
It's about positive feedback loops.

[Carighan]

Oh yeah definitely. Although I wish we'd have stronger effects without needlessly making crit self-multiplicative in effect.

Like, say one tier of gear has max-crit (and since you want highest ilvl you'll be stacking crit like nothing else) then the next has skill/spell speed maxed, etc, and the effects are tuned so you can notice how yeah your crit may no longer be "Every second attack crits" but now you're firing like a machine gun.