A far better option would be for SE to get some people into the design team that are long time MMO healers, can bring some passion for the support role and hopefully have seen first hand how other mmos have approached the healer 'issue'.

2.0's WHM and SCH were beautifully balanced and complimented each other beautifully. Both had their strengths but both were still entirely relevant right the way through to 3.0.

However it pains me to say it but AST was a poorly executed hack job slapped on the side of the game for lack of any better ideas within the dev team. It's core gameplay is pretty much identical to WHM but with the added benefits of balance. Whilst the two jobs are this similar to each other there's always going to be balance issues.

I get the impression that cleric stance is here to stay and frankly I'd much rather keep it in it's current state, it might be a nuisance but at least it's fluid in play unlike sword/shield oath. Rather a better approach would be to diversify AST and WHM more.

Focus AST more card mechanics and buffs at the expense of it's own personal DPS, for example putting redraw on the GCD and removing the cooldown allowing the AST to spend their GCDs chasing a balance combo rather than nuking away as they currently do. The trick would be to tune AST's personal DPS downwards whilst increasing WHMs up so the end result is fairly close once you take cards into account. Going by some quick cigarette packet math on a typical A12s pug post echo, WHM would need to do roughly 600 DPS more than the AST to compensate for a ~40-50% uptime on aoe balance. Remove accuracy, even up the MP disparity between WHM and AST and that's not that tall an order with the extra DPS oomph a WHM already brings.

Another option would be to add depth to the DPS abilities we already have, making WHM function a little bit more like a disc priest from WoW for example.

Personally, I'd tear up the rule book, blow up all the ASTs, rename the expansion to a healer reborn and make RDM a carbon copy of Warhammer Online's warrior priest =(

Eitherway, simply tweaking and streamlining isn't going to fix the issues with healers at the moment, I've got my fingers crossed that Yoshida's team understands that <3