Have we given up on SCH?

[Deceptus]

I don't think it's either because healers are more balanced now than they've ever been..

Balance doesn't equal fun. Right now healers are boring.

The issue is encounter design gives healers a ton of downtime. The conundrum is the devs don't want to fill this time by giving healers a more complex DPS arsenal, or a true rotation, but they also don't want to change up encounter design to give them more to do.

This is exactly right. The stated developer vision is to make healers more healing focused but they're not willing to change the battle design to meet that vision. IMHO, that goes back to developer competency. You can't say you want to do something and completely fail to do it. Not partially fail, they have completely failed their stated vision.

Healers today are doing almost exactly the same amount of GCD's healing as they did before, just now their dps rotation is boring. If SE doesn't make healers buffers / debuffers their only other option during downtime is to do damage.

But when your answer to the problem is, "Give me more DPS skills", or if healers want to continue to focus on their DPS "rotation" as the elephant in the room, I can say with a lot of confidence that your focus differs from where the dev team is placing theirs, and your continued disappointment is imminent.

Personally I think they need to shift healer downtime from dpsing to buffing / debuffing.