Bows aren't worth playing until they are revamped, which is coming in 2021 according to Strimtom's recent dev interview.

The problem with bows today:

* The number of attacks don't scale as well as throwers and Inquisitive. Alacrity is also capped much lower than what bonuses provide today. On a full BAB character, anything over 21% Alacrity is wasted. 3/4 BAB characters benefit from a touch more Alacrity.

* Dated enhancement trees. While DWS is a solid tree for bows/throwers, Arcane Archer hasn't been updated since U28.1 -- five years ago. Also, because not all bow characters should have to be Rangers, certain trees like EK where you'd expect bows to be supported, aren't (no doubleshot bonuses and Eldritch Shot doesn't exist -- similar to KotC before the recent revamp that supported ranged). Fighters are effectively limited to Kensei, unless they access AA as an Elf, since there's not enough juice in the universal trees. While monks technically support bows via feats like Zen Archery, monkchers have been dead for years as an archetype.