In all honesty, if I wanted to give a suggestion of what they should do to make up for removing consumable items it would be to not only increase bow base damage, but also make some type of class specific upgrade to Archer/Bard that allows them to go into gear or trait window and then adjust "ammo type" so it adds to strategy of the job.

The ammo type adjustment would be similar to the original idea that different ammo types caused more damage to certain types of mobs (IE magic type, Large mob type, Poison tipped, etc) but it isn't a consumable item or a sellable one for that matter. It is instead similar to some of the class specific Abilities you get on Bard, Paladin, Dragoon, etc. In essence you would do a quest to obtain the ability to learn the function of different ammo types. This would either cause more damage to the mob family, or create certain special effects on the mob when used (IE: Elemental def down, bleeding, silence, blind, paralysis).