I definitely think GPT is better than Bard, but Bard definitely did live up to the hype in a few ways. The two that blew my mind (and still do to some extent) are the blazing speed and the ability to pull information real time (no more pesky knowledge cutoff date). Bard also felt pretty comparable to 3.5 to me, better in some things and worse in others. Coding was definitely a bust with Bard.