If they made healers into pure healers, would you still play it?

[Sylve]

Embracing that healer DPS is a thing and making that more interesting respects the game's existing design, accommodates accessibility, is less work & is an easier solution and can break the monotony, it accommodates solo play too and is nothing drastic at all, because the game was already designed for it, they just dumbed it down to death.

They already did that. The reason for our DPS kits being simplified isn't because of "dumbing down" or pure healing nonsense, it was done to eliminate the disparity between the Healers DPS output.
Yoshi-P talks about it here: https://twinfinite.net/2019/05/ffxiv...ers-interview/

If you start adding more complex rotations, we go right back to the olden days of WHM doing all the heavy lifting while the co healer focuses on DPS.

If you want more interesting downtime options, we're better off with DPS synergies with our Healing output. Something akin to the Blood Lily. Not literally the Blood Lily and Misery, But the concept that Healing feeds into our DPS in some way that feels organic.
Not so much that we go back to the aforementioned olden days, But enough that we deal our damage in a way that doesn't compete with our healing. WHM and its Blood Lily along with AST and its Cards are excellent starts, all SCH needs is some kind of interesting synergy with its kit for dealing damage.

I don't think we'll ever escape from having a filler GCD nuke. We don't have the ramp up freedom that a DPS job gets and (much like it used to) losing your ramped up damage state (All DoTs rolling etc) would be a pain to recover from in terms of DPS.
We just need to be able to seamlessly switch from Healing to Damage without feeling like we're 'losing' something.