I think this is a matter of perspective to be honest. I've always preferred the fact that sch felt alot more subtle then other classes, if anything is a moment of awesome for a sch, it's doing a large Adlo deploy and laughing at the damage that didn't go out. Or, if you want to be triggered by the fact I just mentioned using a gcd heal, the feeling that I always have a trick to pull out of my sleeves to quickly and efficiently react to out-going damage with my assorted tools.
Hmmm...it's almost like...now hear me out, you can spend all your faerie skills...THEN you can eat her. It's an emergency refill when things are dire at worst, and a tool that rewards planning at it's best. As for the healing +% part? Meh. It would be better if it could effect the actions as well but I see it purely as a reload skill and I find it very effective when thought of like that. Besides, what if you don't need that 3k potency worth of embrace? Then chuck her away and ED for some extra damage. I know for sure you'll disagree but I believe Dissapation was fixed the moment they made it resummon your faerie.
So? If anything the fact that SCH is getting the Broil cast time reduction means that Fey Union can be toggled on and off freely at no cost to you the SCH. Alot of the issue i found with Fey Union was the lack of accessability it had due to how weave spaces work. It will even offset the fact that you can freely ED, so if you don't need to heal right that moment, you ED the stacks and pop Union later when you need to heal. Heck if you're so worried about over capping you can literally tap it once to heal a bit of auto attack damage then immediately toggle it off.
So are pets in general, why do you think we haven't gotten anymore and the faerie is now essentially a totem you place down that you cast cooldowns off of?
You know, a thought about that. I don't think the devs ever wanted SCH to be the way it was in ARR and HW. SCH was literally piggy backing off of a different job for those years and every tool it had for it's job besides Physick and Ressurection where all things they had to shove in post 30 for the quests. If anything, all the years of reworks towards SCH (and even SMN to a lesser extent) seems to scream that the developers massively regret designing the two classes the way they did. SCH was good because it was sharing a toolkit with a DPS class in game where healers are expected to be aggressive instead of being designed from the ground up like CNJ and AST where to be a healer. As much as it hurt going into SHB, that was the devs putting their foot down on that matter once and for all.
The Pure/Barrier thing was never about the OGCD kit, but rather the GCD kit.
Pure healers have unlimited access to their regens via GCDs and stronger GCD raw heals (Cure/Benefic II) and limited (as in cooldowns, not OGCD) access to shields.
Barrier healers have unlimited access to their shielding via GCDs and have to rely on their OGCD/cooldowns to cover more upfront burst heals/regens.
