Thank god FFXIV it's a different game and it's not FFXI, so FFXI shouldn't take part into this conversation.

Benediction as an emergency heal sucks, it's bad, it's terrible, it's only useful when you are in cleric and you don't want to drop cleric. If you want an emergency heal as a WHM you have tetra. Benediction needs to have the animation delay removed to be considered a good emergency heal and even then maybe dropping the cooldown to 4 minutes wouldn't be bad.