I agree that SE should remove the single target barspells and just let RDM have the aoe versions, makes no sense otherwise.
I was never against giving RDM's the capability to buff people, what I am against is forcing a RDM to cast the same spell over and over and over again. The evil xp / merit party style cycles drove most RDM's away from the job and left only the people using it to get gear for a different job. The moment the game got away from merit / xp parties the popularity of RDM died out. That's how sad of a state the job was in prior to abyssea (not to say it got better).
