Yoshida's statements about healers have been a real-life version of that "guy putting on clown makeup" meme.
"The SCH is doing nothing but DPS and forcing the poor WHMs to heal." (Provably false if you spend five minutes looking at logs for any fight.)
"We couldn't really do anything with SCH." (Ignoring multiple threads offering suggestions on improving SCH, not to mention ignoring the possibility of just giving them back their damn DoTs.)
"If you want fun, engaging content as a healer, go play Ultimate." (Because it's apparently okay for an entire role to be boring to play in 95% of the game's content, and only the tank and DPS jobs are allowed to have fun.)
"Oh yeah, we kicked the healer out of our playtesting group for being too good." (Were you afraid they might discover the same problems also discovered by any healer with more brains than a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal? Or do you just sincerely believe that all healers, everywhere, are Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons?)
What I said before has been proven true: all decisions about healing in this game are made from the POV of the healed, not the healer. As long as YoshiderP's BLM gets healed to full after every little boo-boo, he sees nothing wrong with the role. Not only does the man clearly not understand how healers are played in his own game, he also clearly has no interest in the role whatsoever.
Referencing his famous GDC slide from eight years ago ("Running an MMO is like running a country"), while he might live in the same country (game) as his subjects (players), he sure as hell doesn't live in the same province as the healers. He's the guy in Idaho wondering why Chicagoans complain about crime being so high when
his town is perfectly safe. And if he doesn't want to play healers in his own game, why the hell should we? I quit healing three years ago. The "Has anyone quit healing?" thread on the healer board has reached
109 pages. Skilled players are dropping the role because it's boring and the devs have made it very obvious they don't care. At some point, this is going to seriously hurt the game, just as Blizzard's overconfidence and arrogance hurt WoW.