Bard's design intent is itself unbalanced?

From patch 5.7 notes:

" Bard's laning relies heavily on two core patterns to function: playing meep-away with basic attacks and lay on the harrassment, which then opens him up to fulfil his cosmic duties by roaming and powering up through the collection of chimes. This patch we're targeting both of these with changes to his passive and base stats, focused at fine-tuning his flute-smacking in lane and making his roams more rewarding when you're all out of cosmic energies.

General BASE ATTACK DAMAGE 46 ⇒ 52 BASE ARMOR 21 ⇒ 25 "

Alright, so I'm actually interested in hearing Riot's response to this or their explanation of the reasoning of that design philosophy, but here's the thing...

If Bard's design goal is to be so good at poking that they force their opponents to back or leave and can therefore roam, how could that design goal coexist with any reasonable counterplay or contractory design goal. Like, if Bard as a champion depends on being able to force opponents to back, the the devs adjust him until he can, then

Particularly as support, where you need to be a little extra strong in order to be able to do that with a range of champs as your ADC rather than just with the most OP ADCs, it seems that the worst possible place for Bard to exist with that design goal is adc, then support, then top, and the best is probably jungle, then mid.

But yeah, I just really disagree with that design goal and I'm curious about how it came about and whether or not it's actually as bad as I think it is. I'm trying to use logic here but I'm probably missing something. :)

Anyways rito please, wtf is being planned here and why?

Flute-smacking.