Is AST recognized as a viable healer yet?

[Nihility]

so having access to all 3 at 60 and fairly equally geared

it is a fair statement to say astrologian is completely competent and usable at 60
but

first hand experience with both will quickly make it apparent that white mage healing capability is way beyond what astro can do. Astro honestly feels like white mage-lite to me. The new Collective unconcious and synastry are quite nice and useful but by no means cover the gap.

and compared to a scholar, there just really is no comparison. A nocturnal astro isn't even scholar-lite it's not even close to an acceptable replacement in a raid

also astro dps is just terrible to the point that the card buffs don't even cover the gap between a white mage or especially scholar simply dps'ing
In 4-man content especially a scholar can very nearly just be a full time dps while the fairy covers healing speeding up runs significaly

the cards can be really cool but at the same time 4 of the 6 are undesirable most of the time
especially the refresh ones, in 4-man content i have never seen a situation where i needed one and in 8-man content the bard or machinist does so much more, so much more reliably and party-wide negating any usefulness random little single target ones might have provided

[adn]

first hand experience with both will quickly make it apparent that white mage healing capability is way beyond what astro can do. Astro honestly feels like white mage-lite to me. The new Collective unconcious and synastry are quite nice and useful but by no means cover the gap.

That is exactly what it is. Take away the card buffs and AST is just a second-rate WHM. They need to re-evaluate the core of the class, which probably will not happen until 4.0 since they seem to like doing drastic class changes during expansions rather than during the patch cycle. Still, they've brought it up to the level where AST can do A4S so it should be OK for now.