The reason we healers DPS

[Reiryuu]

You’d be surprised how many people feel overwhelmed in a similar fashion just all throughout their downtime. It can be for several reasons, maybe they forgot where the skill binding was, or aren’t used to healing, or take a lot of time to target, or have to see full hp bars to breath. Basically they simply never get comfortable enough to push dps.

All right, but should everyone else be punished because they can't handle it, or should there be more training opportunities for those who are slow and uncomfortable? Are you going to hold the entire class back when many understand the material to an adequate degree or are you going to give those that need help some extra help outside of class, perhaps give them a few extra practice assignments to help gain confidence? If SE really wants something like that to happen, why not differentiate the healers to appease multiple playstyles instead of dumb all of them down to fit one particular playstyle? Hell, why not do that with WHM/Conj? Take out the WHM stone, you get a heal-only version of the WHM. Pop the stone back in, you get access to all the more complicated stuff. Conj can already equip all the healing gear anyway.

[EaMett]

All right, but should everyone else be punished because they can't handle it, or should there be more training opportunities for those who are slow and uncomfortable? Are you going to hold the entire class back when many understand the material to an adequate degree or are you going to give those that need help some extra help outside of class, perhaps give them a few extra practice assignments to help gain confidence?

It's really hard to know exactly why SE made the changes they made. There have only been a couple of things they've expressed in regards to healers. And that's that:
1) They don't like that healer optimization means aiming at freeing more offensive GCDs
2) They struggle to balance healers.

But we don't know anything else past that. is 1) a personal preference or is it an opinion based on some internal metric? Is 2) because they don't have the ressources, the tools, the knowledge, the experience? Is 2) in part because their design is flawed from the start, or their idea of what balanced healers are is misplaced?

Kinda hard to tell. We know they have little healer experience just from the fact they created something like lilies and the original PI. It's pretty obvious since any experienced healer could tell it was bad before even trying it out (and said so in forums). What is also obvious is that they're completely disconnected from their online healer community and have been for quite a few years. It's also a safe bet to say they don't have the proper tools or have a really restrictive concept of "balance" given how hard they're trying to homogenize healers.

But beyond that there's so much more that is unclear. Do they want the classes to play better or be more popular? If it's the later then maybe they'll get more new players into healers than old ones leaving? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows.
And that also applies to:

As for inclusivity. While all nice and good, there is a stark difference between being inclusive and coddling. SE does the latter by making everything extremely easy. This, in turn, gives no incentive for players to improve.

Honestly, I've said this multiple times over the past 2 years. But SE's idea of balanced healers is just plain wrong and their idea to fix it even worse. Homogenization of healers for balance is going against 40 years of game design principles. AND them making that balance while lowering the skill ceiling and removing our risk/reward mechanisms is also in violation of basic game design principles. Especially when they could have accomplished the same without going to those lengths.
So All in all I have no clue what they were thinking.

The options we're left with are. They either don't know what they're doing, or there's some hidden agenda we aren't grasping. Maybe healer balance is costing them too much so they said "screw it, homogenize the shit out of them and give everyone trust healers to make up for lack of players". Money saved.