WHY ARE YOU PLAYING A BARD IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SING?!

[Felessan]

^^^ doesn't understand Holy.

If you spam holy at bards expense - you are doing it wrong. Holy is a good way to lessen healing (but you will be capped after 3 holy) and burn excessive mana for some additional damage. You should always, if you heal properly and you tank properly geared, have enough mana to do 3 holy and then heal tank through the rest of fight.
If a bard forced to maintain Ballad during fight to help you with mana - party will loose more DPs that it gain with your holy.

Scarebearz, you just said that you had a WHM alt. You should now by now that the job of healers is to patch up the mistakes of others... constantly.

It's your job as a healer to properly manage your mana, and not just chain-res stupid people until you have zero mana. Yes, sometimes mana runs out - but at this points it perfectly clear that party is just bad. Very bad. And then you can start spam your BRD with <se.10> to get ballad.
This is how it should be in a perfect world. But reality is much simpler - most WHM have no idea how to manage mana and heal properly, have overheal more than 50% and thus often have problems.

Foe is pointless, ballad should be pointless because healers can sleepwalk their way through ST...

If you are not in MT party - you can spam Medica every 10 seconds and stop looking at screen at all. And you'll be ok. Some people really do ST this way.

Singing takes 1 button press. 1 gcd. And any bard not doing it should be thrown right out of a party if they insist upon not singing when asked, and jesus Christ I hate needing to ask for it when I play my blm....

It's really depends on situation. Normally bards should spend their mana on songs, but it most probably will be foe and foe only and only in specific parts of fights.
Spending mana on ballad/paeon is not just 1 click, it's also 20% of bard damage, and in most situation it's a bad tradeoff.