Honestly, I still find it considerably harder to recover lost health on scholar than on white mage (as well as considerably easier to prevent the health loss in the first place).

So I'm not sure I would agree that shield homogenization has gone so far that we might as well take it all the way. The fact that scholar now has access to some (non-spammable) direct heals doesn't mean it's not "about shields" anymore, because it still has more access to shields and less access to direct heals than other healers.

(It's worth noting, though, that I'm commenting from a dungeon perspective here, and things may be different in raids.)