How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[ty_taurus]

I don't think the activities you've listed are especially engaging for any role, not only for healers. But I think that's fine. Not all content needs to be super engaging. They call it "grinding" for a reason: it's just a mindless repetitive activity. I don't do treasure maps for engaging gameplay. I do them to have a laugh with friends. When I want content that requires a high level of focus and attention, I do savage or ultimate. But when I just want to relax and turn my brain off, I do an alliance raid or a jumping puzzle in the Gold Saucer, or whatever. I think it's good that the game provides this kind of variety.

It seems to me like you're looking for engaging gameplay in the wrong places. If you want to be challenged, don't grind fates, or do treasure maps, or farm fights that you've already cleared.

Hard disagree here. Yes, challenging content like learning new savage and extreme fights is engaging, but maintaining your optimal rotation during grindy content is far more entertaining than doing it as a healer. I switched to be a Dancer main in ShB and I have fallen in love with the job since. Sure it's very simple to play in comparison to some other DPS, and I would certainly appreciate a bit more depth getting added to the job, but I like how I'm always paying attention to my procs and I feel excitement every time I get through any given 30 seconds where I was able to avoid any amount of clipping and my Standard Step goes off cooldown exactly as that last GCD refreshes because I know that I did my job perfectly for those 30 seconds.

And let's take a look at MSQ progression, where virtually no healing needs to be done at all. Playing through the ShB story as Dancer felt exciting. I felt like I was in the story. I couldn't imagine having to have gone through some of those instance fights, like Ran'jit, or the level 56? instance in Lakeland (the one with all the sin eaters) as a healer. What would I even do in those?

To be honest, I can't wrap my head around the mentality that it's okay for the job to have nothing to do in casual content as long as there's challenging content that pressures you to use more. And even then, I would stress that the healers aren't very well designed in that regard right now either.

WHM suffers from dreadful clipping issues, and its selection of GCD healing is bloated with repetition despite the job not actually having a bloat issue.
Pet AI has a glaring, broken flaw that SCH usually can avoid (though that can also make it more easy to fall into that trap than SMNs who are more consciously aware of it), they're the worst barrier healer most of the time (forcing a Crit Adloquium is their only real selling point, but because that fights their DPS, it's only something you want in very specific circumstances). Succor and Adloquium are ignored in most content and not the main focal point of their healing in challenging content.
ASTs can struggle to get all of their seals for their opening Divination and Nocturnal's only value from a meta standpoint is when paired with another AST or WHM, but only when progging content. If you're playing through familiar content, then Diurnal is still better. (I'm sure a certain someone's gonna tell me how much of a meta slave I am for that)

There's a severe lack of understanding of how healers actually play from the developer standpoint which is just a consequence of the main designers just not playing healers ever and thus not having a strong enough understanding of what things actually do.