Healer Unhappiness exists on the Jap Healing Forums as well.

[Absurdity]

I guess I could've worded that better. I never said WHM should be the baby healer, when I talked about AST's rDPS I was talking about the current healer design. Yes, AST healing is easy but getting the maximum benefit out of it's party buffs is not, like your Midare example. And if you manage to achieve that level of basically perfect play, not just from you but also from your party to make the most out of these buffs, then you should be able to contribute more dps than a job that is basically just "spam button for dps and profit".

If SE decides to give WHM a more complex kit for it's dps then you won't hear me complain about it and if that leads to the best WHMs having the potentially highest healer dps contribution then that's also a non-issue...maybe fix the clunky parts while they're at it.

The issue here is that when you combine these two statements together you get a perpetual meta that will never and (if we take those statements to be facts) should never change.

Not that it shouldn't change but simply that people have to accept that there will always be a meta unless you literally make every job the same within a given role, which is not a desirable outcome. The simple fact is that as long as jobs bring different benefits to a party then there will be jobs which perform better than others in a specific environment.