Cordovan, please do not take this personally. I am completely pixxed off with SSG. The Sonic Blast nerf was probably the final nail in the coffin for me. SSG have effectively ruined a wonderful class. Why? I think its for two major reasons: (1) they seem to pander to a small group in the community that have been complaining that the MCL8 Sonic Blast spell being OP, and (2) they make changes to the game without prior testing, without consultation with the community and without any seemingly competence.
The Archetypes for Bard and Cleric are appallingly bad. The first one has too many spells and no mana, and the second is simply a poorly designed weaksauce (trying to do too many things and none well). And why is this? Because SSG have shown time and again that they get things wrong by themselves and don't want to consult the people who actually play the game. I am all for rebalance in DDO, and it comes as no real surprise to me that the extra CL and MCLS in AoV cores were removed, but what does surprise me is to render a spell caster Bard obsolete; the MCL8 Sonic Blast carried the Bard into Epics and Stormsingers will run out of spell points faster than you can say "SSG hasn't thought about the changes in a balanced manner yet again".
And Hardcore League is less fun this time... could it be from the poorly implemented changes by SSG? There seems to be a correlation between my enjoyment with the game and game changes imposed by SSG.
Think better! Communicate better! Keep it real!
EDIT: Cordovan, get your colleagues to read the definition of the word "archetype" and its inherent meaning and then compare that notion to the reaction from the DDO community to your new trees.