I don't get it, why isn't Bard the first support who gets real big-boy AP scalings?

I get what you were going for: Something similar to Braum, where a single real damage skill is offset by oodles of cool intangible supporty benefits and a cool aa-based passive. But it's been shown by his winrate over the past month or so that's been consistently several percentage points below urgot that it just doesn't work at all. For one thing, Braum is a wickedly awesome tank with a really great kit for tanking. You also said he was inspired by Alistar, right? Well you know what happens when Alistar shows up in your lane unexpectedly? Here have a 1s knockup and then BOOP you're under my ally's tower, you're flippin' dead if Alistar shows up. Bard shows up? Oh no, I might get hit by a 1s stun and a weaksauce autoattack slow thingy. I am so poked very scary, and now ooohhh nooo he's putting down a little shiny thing that'll give my opponent a totally worthless speed boost and 40HP. Well GG lane over.

So no. Bard is not Braum, Bard is not Alistar. Missed the mark there I'm afraid. You know who Bard strikes me as a lot more similar to? Karma. She's got one real damage skill in lane, a sustain/speed boost thing, very low hard cc for a support, but you know what she has got? AP scalings. Karma can come back to lane with a chunk of AP and smash your face in with an ult-Q.

So why doesn't Bard just scale with AP? He's never gonna become an oppressive presence top or mid-dude's got zero waveclear and his passive requires him to leave lane. He'd be about as scary as top/mid Nami. Sure he can poke you and out sustain you but he'll lose half his farm to the tower and what is he even gonna do in an all in, jingle at you?

Here's the first step to fixing bard: Anything called an AP scaling in his kit? Double it. Maybe not double it for Q, but at least give it like .75 or something. DEFENITELY double it for his W. The reward for using that correctly rather than snapcasting it has to be hefty, or the skill's just gonna be Janna tornado 2.0.

Bard should be THE late game scaling support. Look at Soraka, she gets crapped on all lane phase but she can say "well at least I'll have a .5 AP scaling heal on a 0 second CD late game" and Soraka doesn't even need to run around the whole friggin map collecting bananas for the tally-man before she unlocks the ability to recall home.

So please, Riot. Take a risk on Bard. Let us at least see on PBE what he feels like. I wanna see this cool champ capable of doing something good.

Tl;DR: Do a PBE test of Bard, but with double his current AP ratios. See what happens when a support actually gets a reason to build AP.