I've read the other bard abilities. Most of them do nothing at all for me, are largely variants, or are meh.
Most of Pathfinder is meh to me honestly. The changes do not at all fix what I hate about 3.5, so it's already missing the boat for me. The 'derp' thing with my favourite class is kind of the 'oh give me a break' straw though.
And sure, it could be houseruled. Several problems with that, though:
1. If I'm the player, I have to convince the DM of this and why it's a good idea. I have yet to have a DM who didn't hate bards, my first DM decided that Inspire Courage took a Standard action *each round*. So I'm not liking my chances on that.
2. If I'm the DM... Wait that's not going to happen because from what I can tell Pathfinder hasn't made DMing any less miserable than 3.5 was.

3. If I'm at the point of houseruling major class features, I'm at the point of looking for a system that does what I want better anyway.
Also, a small group of non-optimized characters fighting larger, longer battles is hardly a corner case, or at least no more of a corner case than the large group of heavily-optimized characters fighting single-round battles against one or two monsters.
In fact, Pathfinder's way is worse because while the old system works for *both* cases, the new one only works for the second case. Five or six round battles that are one of several such in a day where we're dungeon crawling is common for me. Say I'm a L6 Bard. Old system, I can perform for all of the four or five battles we're in. Hell, if I go down they've still got several rounds to finish it off before it wears off. New system, 17 rounds == Three and a half battles, assuming an average of five rounds and 16 starting CHA. 18 starting CHA gives me a whopping one extra round.
Now say this is Munchkin McPowergamerLand and we've got six people, all optimized to the hilt, and we rip through four battles a day at L6 in one round each. Both systems here work out exactly the same. Actually unless I win init it's almost pointless for me either way.
Now at L1 this is probably better since, yeah, one use of music is one fight and seven rounds will probably get you two easy early-level fights. But past L3 or so? (And most campaigns I've been in past the first one didn't start at L1, either. 6 or 7 is common. The one other one we did start at L1 was d20 Deadlands rather than D&D so it wasn't even the same classes anyway.)
The old way covers all gaming situations. The new way does not. *shrug*
Does not work for me, as I said before, YMMV, but for me it's yuck and one more reason to just stick with the houseruled version of 3.5 we were already using. (Which has an even more pared-down skill system than Pathfinder, and stole 4e's save attributes to help compensate for how god-awful 3.5's save system is, something Pathfinder doesn't even adress. So we learn a new system, have to houserule it anyway, the 'improvements' are debatable... No thanks. Not for me, not for them either because they wouldn't want to learn all the little changes.)
Assuming anyone can even get me to play 3.5 again in the first place. 4e Bards do Bard so much better for me than 3.x ever did it's not even funny. Hell, 4e *Swordmages* do Bard better for me.
I had kind of hoped that Pathfinder's Bard might get me onto it again since my usual group won't even *read* 4e, let alone play it, but nope. No such look. Not for me. Enjoy it if it works for you, but I'll pass.
