I actually did tank that boss on my sage after my tank friend ate too many mechanics and died (it was his first time) so anything is possible.
Ya, I'm pretty sure SCH could comfortably handle it with Soil, Adlo and Protraction as well.
To be clear, my point wasn't that healers outright can't do it, rather that it needs a good amount of mitigation. At least more than I can do every 60 seconds as AST.
Highly subjective.
I came from WoW.
Their encounter designs are uninspired and have been for a long time.
The only thing true in your statement, is that auto attacks from bosses are high damage, requiring a healer to be on constant tank duty. But you have to factor into their larger groups in raids and how aoe heals work.
Some healers want to be constantly busy with healing requirements like in other MMOs, I too am one of this mindset. But this game's healing requirement isn't like this... unless you pug hard content, early on in the patch cycle, before everyone knows the strats and over-gear the content.
Comparisons to WoW are always problematic because WoW has changed drastically over the years.
Legion healing kicked ass though.
IMHO:
I think they will stay the course for multiple reasons.
Yoshida appears to prefer to keep a smaller more efficient team. A radical overhaul of the game would need a serious recruitment spree and neither Yoshida nor SE's bean counters have shown that that's something they want to pursue.
The game is successful therefore the recipe is working... right? It's pretty easy for a developer to fall into the trap of being almost arrogant about their own game, doubly so when it's big of a success story on all accounts as FFXIV has turned into over the years. Yoshida has shown signs of this over the years right from ARR's launch with the Warrior debacle.
Will things ever change? The way I see it it'll take either WoW having an ARR style rebirth of its own or some other competitor coming out of the blue to steal the momentum away from FFXIV. That'll trigger the inevitable next gen MMO from SE with FFXIV getting handed over to a fresh young team in the same way FFXI was. What we'll get out of that is anyone's guess but I'd expect some shake ups to drag more life out of the old game.
My copium take is that their design philosophy is probably working for them especially well because of the influx of new players. But if these players stick and get better, they'll need to do something about healers. They've already acknowledged that healers were bored, I just don't think they fully grasp why. I'm hoping that given a bit of time they'll figure it out. With that said, Misery not having its potency adjusted smells a lot of OG lilies.