Interestingly, I've been playing my AST more and more because I don't feel as pressured to output good damage on it, and I used to pride myself on how long I could stay in cleric stance and how often I'd be out-DPSing the actual DPS. I do like that the 3.5 dungeons require me to heal more than I used to though.
That said, the constant bombardment of "healers should X" "healers shouldn't Y" by the community is exhausting and is a prime example of why we can't have nice things and will probably lose the choice in how we play at some point down the line.