Should Swords Bards Just Learn Maneuvers?

[Snowbluff]

One of the big issues with 3.5E was that casters could basically do all the martial stuff better than martials, and often from fairly low levels (depending on your stats and your system mastery, or simply make martials an unnecessary part of the game).

People often state that casters were just better at martial stuff, which is true, but this took a lot of work. Casters were both harder to build and play, but also more rewarding. The simple fact of the matter is a core fighter would just basically just do the same thing each turn. Later books expanded their options greatly, by bringing in maneuvers and other abilities that could change how you operate your turn.

5e maneuvers do this, but for only one subclass. A lot of the time, your turn is basically the same, attack action, with very little decision making. The weakness was recognized, but the solution was only applied sparingly, with the other improvement being the spellcasting variants of classes.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but I'm definitely the kind of player and DM who favors having "more buttons to push" for the players.

[Witty Username]

Having played swords bard, I think there is some argument that the added pieces of swords bard are easy to keep track of, and defensive flourish it somewhat critical for the swords melee combat as written. Also, there is something to be said that the flourishes are all strongly tied to what the swords bard is thematically. Could this be replicated with the PHB maneuvers, eh, Evasive footwork, sweeping attack and pushing attack are close but weaker overall. This also opens the question of using superiority dice or keeping it tied to inspiration, Which is either accepting things as weaker, or adding another resource to track as well as opening maneuver + inspiration which swords bard normally has problems with.
I do not think anything needs to change.

On the other points, more classes having access to maneuver/maneuver-like abilities sounds like a reasonable idea to me.