@Tempest: All rare cards that need to be lost to the Queen of Cards can be reclaimed from her son who lives in a house near the pub, while all other cards lost to the Queen will be replayed by herself. So it's actually not possible to mess up with this quest to an extent where it can no longer completed.
The new Kiros card holder in Winhill inn even appears if you haven't lost the Quezacotl card to the Queen of Cards yet. She should always show up after ringing the bell on the counter to the far left of the room. The Kiros card refines into 3 Aegis Amulets in this mod, which can be used to make your physically fragile party members dodge physical attacks more often.
@ClownofSorrows: I'm not sure what access you're referring to. More information would help.
@aegisjester: Unfortunately, many scenes throughout the game rely on Squall being in the active party, so excluding him will result in glitches or make the game crash - at least without rewriting most fields from scratch. Could do it for disc 4 perhaps, as there's not much going on story-wise, but even that would mean quite a bit of work, as Squall is supposed to be the party leader in Chocobo Forests, for example.
I'll put a changelog that lists standard and hard mode differences to the OP shortly (a quick summary can already be viewed some posts back).
As for Card Mod results, I'm ok with most of them as they currently are. If you play Triple Triad regularly, you can still get many cards that grant access to spells and items that aren't available through other means yet. Even if it takes time to get full stocks for junctioning, getting a few for casting in battle alone is already worth it, as you said (the possibility of reliably getting Fish Fins from Fastitocalons at the beaches near Dollet was a mistake that will be corrected soon; the first opportunity to get them regularly was supposed to be at the beaches near Deling City instead).
I know that seeing something like Dino Bone having become a LV 7 boss card result can be irritating at first, but the value of items like these is usually completely different in this mod (in comparison to the base game), as most spells do much more damage or have useful supportive capabilities that are rather irrelevant in the base game (Double, Full-life etc).
Besides that, there are just too many cards in the game to give every single one a decent result if you want to keep things balanced and accessible right after the start of the game. An alternative would be moving the Card Mod Ability to the end-game so every single card mods into something really useful, but that's not very desirable, is it?