Sorry for the wall.
If you used Inspire Courage during most combats, you were less useless than you think. If you could look back over the statistics of your sessions, I'm willing to bet there were a ton of times you allies hit only due to your morale bonus. Each of those hits should be put under your hat. Same thing for all the extra damage your allies did while Inspire Courage was up. You may not have directly done the damage, but those enemies did died faster all because of you.
Sure, a melee character is going to seem boring after playing a bard. As for the lack of personality, a big part of that is you are probably comparing your current character vs the bard with all that character development and interacts up until he died, not when you started him. Without the proper mindset and tools, bringing in a new character after just losing one you enjoyed is difficult. What I do while/after building a character is to create a basic background for him/her. If I'm having trouble coming up with my own ideas, I'll visit Hero Builder's Guidebook [3.0E D&D] (pgs 38-55), Ultimate Campaign [Pathfinder] (pgs 16-51), and/or Xanathar's Guide to Everything [5E D&D] (pgs 61-73) to help flesh out my character concept. Knowing where my character comes from RP wise is as important to me as know where he's going build wise too me. When I roll on the provided charts, I generally roll thrice and pick the one that appeals to me the most at that time. I then try to write at most a half page backstory using the results.
What your missing:
Dedicated Healer - If you find your current character boring, a dedicated healer will leave you crying in the corner. Unlike most other roles, a dedicated healer is a reactive game... simply waiting till someone needs you instead of directly dealing with the source of those injuries. The only time they are really active is when facing a powerful and/or mothertrucking horde of undead It is quite possible to play without a healer, my group does it more often than not, but it requires the party to adopt tactics that support that play-style. If you don't want to play a healer, convince your group to invest in more wands of healing (and other such items) and/or hire an NPC to fill that role. Should you decide to take this route, build yourself a character who can heal, but is not focused on it exclusively. Also avoid making this role a buffer as well; having to chose between using a spell slot on healing or buffing can cause analysis paralysis and such a character has a very tiny role in the active combat.
Buffer - There are a lot of ways to build a buffer, with the majority being a caster of some sort. In my opinion, the bard is the most simplistic of the casters for buffing. At this time, only the Marshal from the Miniatures Handbook and the Dragon Shaman from Players Handbook 2 come to mind as a non-caster that provides a party buff. Another thing to consider is a buffer generally doesn't directly do a lot of damage in combat themselves. This will hark back to your feelings of uselessness during combat... until you start looking at how your buffs allow your allies to hit more often, deal more damage, and reduce/ignore damage.
Know-it-All - Unfortunately, Wizards and Bards are the two best options for this. Not a lot of classes provide all the Knowledges as Class Skills.
A setting is simply the world you are playing in. There are several settings that span multiple editions, with only various revision and/or additions to the lore with each new edition. Nothing about the edition you are playing will effect the setting your DM has chosen.
Suggestions:
(1) Not in any particular order
(2) Can't give more explicit advice without knowing more about how you want this new character to interact in combat.
(3) How important do you consider each of the following missing slots: Healer, Buffer and Know-it-All? Do you want to fill as many as possible or focus on one?
Bard (PHB) - You already know this class, you seemed to enjoy playing it before and there is nothing wrong with playing another. I've known several players who only play one class/theme. It can do all three things you feel are missing from the group. I would advice building a different kind of bard than the one you first played, which will be easier since your first one died before he could grab a prestige class.
Paladin (PHB) - This is class is a half-caster with access to various healer spells, but not designed to be a healer. That access will however, allow you to use wands and scrolls with limited risk of wasting charges. You also have Lay on Hands, a pool of points you can spend on Healing. It's more of a band-aid than true healing, but good enough to keep party members up until you can use your wands, potions. etc after the fight. I do not recall this class having access to many of the group buffs, though they do have some fun personal ones. Your knowledges will be limited to Religion and Nobility. In addition, you can stand in the front line with everyone else dealing damage while "waiting" to heal.
Druid (PHB) - While this is a full-caster class, it has enough class features and extra options from the various books out there that you can spend very little time casting. At the same time... using the base wildshape from the PHB can result in a bigger headache keeping track of which form is the best choice for the given fight for whichever level you currently are. The alternative provided in the PHB2 is a lot simpler, but not as powerful. This class has access to most of the necessary healer spells and does not have their spell list locked down like the bard (meaning if you need to restore a damaged/drained ability score, you can do it tomorrow). Unfortunately, you only get Nature as a knowledge.
Dragon Shaman (PHB2) - Honestly, this is not a super powerful class (should be on par at least with the monk). That being said, I still love it for the various class features and RP opportunities it provides. If you can convince your DM to allow the metabreaths feats from Draconomicon (list on page 68) they are a lot of fun. At seventh level, you'll have access to a small pool of healing like the paladin's Lay on Hands and 5 out of the 7 auras provided by the class. An aura is a 30ft radius buff to all allies, self included; one of which includes Fast Healing 1, up to half max hp. That won't be spectacular for in-combat use, except preventing an ally from bleeding to death, but useful after combat before using other precious resources like spells and items. They unfortunately only have access to knowledge Nature, which is super weird since dragons fall under Arcana... you may wish to ask you DM to allow you to take Arcana instead.
Warlock (Complete Arcane) - Ultra lite caster. Effective you pick a tiny selection of "spells" and/or abilities, but then can use them without those pesky spell slot limits. They have no healing or party buffing powers in and of themselves, but were clearly designed to make use of magic items to augment their deficiencies. Early levels can be a bit boring, but one of the easiest class to hit with attacks (their primary attack targets touch ac instead of normal ac). If you do consider a warlock, the book Dragon Magic contains additional invocations to chose from, including the actual useful melee invocation. If you can make it to twelfth level, you can start making any items you think you need, assuming you took the appropriate feat(s) to make said item. Craft Wand and Craft Wondrous Item are the go to options. They have access to the Arcana, Planes and Religion knowledges.
