1-There are 2 kinds of bards - Troubadors and Dirges. Troubadors are seen as the 'happy' bards and Dirges as the 'dark' bards if i can say so. What it means is...i have a troubador, and they are really buff friendly, while, from what i understand, dirges have more debuffs.
2-While SOE will claim that all their classes are well balanced and are all able to do everything, there are some tendencies that have been seen. Everyone can solo, but if you are a templar, you have to take a day off to kill anything but undeads. Guardians are not the quickest of soloers around either, they take a lot of damage but don't hit for much. Sadly, by trying to balance their classes, not only have they taken away some flavor to some classes, but in some cases they just failed, period. Furies have more dps potential than Enchanters (who are a mage class) and in all honesty, mezzes are nowhere near a necessity, making the chanter class really not popular.
3-Hard to say from server to server, but I think its safe to say brigands and dirges are not the most popular classes around. Theres not millions of defilers on my server either.
4-Harder to say than in 3. Since all races can be any class, the race you pick is merely for esthetic reasons. I've seen wood elves assasins, dark elves paladin, halfling bruisers, etc. I have an halfling pally and i like him much.
5-This is a MMOG, so yes, there are bots.
6-Job ? i see you coming from FFXI. I'd say don't mind what is more popular or not...do what you really want to, period. It also depends on what playstyle you intend to play...if you intend to solo 90% of the time, then please don't pick a templar, you'll end up with enough frustrations to go out and kill at night...a way to figure it out is to see what was your favorite job in FFXI and then try to pick the 'equivalent' in EQ2.
7-Much quicker than FFXI. Skillchains are replaced by Heroic Opportunities, a kind of wheel that appears in your screen to show the progression. All in all i prefer Eq2's battle system because it is quicker.