I wouldn't go as far as saying that SE don't give a damn about healers. But rather they don't appear to have anyone either directly on the battle system team or perhaps even someone that carries weight within the design lead that is heavily invested in the healer role.

It's not so much that they are treating it with contempt, but rather they don't have any long term vision or insight into the role's issues and how things actually pan out when played at a competent level across a wide range of content. This has caused them to make stupid decisions and basic mistakes over and over again, often repeating near enough the same errors.

A few quick examples:

AST's lack of a spammable AoE until later than the other healers was generally considered to be a bad thing, especially by veteran healers who would have likely had Blizzard II when levelling WHM and SCH. SE took this knowledge and decided that it would be a good idea for SCH to not have a spammable AoE at any level for Stormblood.

Large stathes of WHM's kit is just stupid. Free Cure is just dumb, sorry if you feel otherwise but it genuinely is and I die a little inside whenever I see someone mention about fishing for Free Cure procs. Spending 400MP for a 15% chance to save 1000MP. Why? Cure has a small amount of value in it's faster cast but that is literally all it brings these days.

Continuing on the WHM warpath. 4.0 Plenary Indulgence. What was that ability supposed to be? When the SB media build went out I was hoping it'd be a return to the days of bosses such as Caduceus and Kaliya with both tanks getting curb stomped at the same time. Instead we got Deltascape which was anything but. PI mk1 was an ability that was 4 years too late and made zero sense at the point it was introduced, expecting us to spam Cures in a tier that never needed us to spam Cures. Secret of the Lily I and II fell foul of exactly the same fundamental flaw.

Whilst we're talking about useless WHM abilities. Fluid Aura in patch 5.0. I've seen the occasional defence for it mentioned here in that 'it's useful to bind something that's dangerous in the overworld' to which I counter 'just Regen yourself instead.' If you can land a bind on it, it's not dangerous. If it's dangerous enough that you don't want it hitting you, it's probably a fate boss in which case A) It's going to be bind immune and B) It's going to have something else hitting it in which case the bind would break even if it did land. Regen yourself and carry on. Why did they not realise that this ability was entirely useless and a waste of an icon in it's 5.0 form?

I think it's already been mentioned here earlier but SE made changes to WHM citing wanting to reduce agro, but the change to Assize actually increased WHM agro generation overall, and quite significantly at that.

Moving onto AST. Cards went from being 4 keys in total (Draw, RR, Spread and Shuffle) to 8 keys (Draw, RR, Spread, Shuffle, Undraw, Undraw Spread, Minor Arcana, Sleeve Draw). The Undraw abilities were fine in their own right. But removing ASTs ability to click off cards in their buff list was undeniably idiotic.

I'm sure there's loads more, but these are the ones that spring to mind for me. Most of these wouldn't have made it off the team whiteboard if they had have had someone there with a healthy amount of experience playing healers to a good standard. Instead we have our role being designed by people who likely barely understand the role anymore than the occasional random DPS we get coming in here ranting that we need to only heal in group content because some Netflix watching healer got them killed in a dungeon somewhere.

Adding a few more battle system designers would allow them the luxury of trying to have someone invested in each role within the team which would hopefully not only improve the consistency and relevancy of new abilities and changes to the role, but also add a bit more creativity and passion into the mix as well. Even the great hope that is Sage is yet another cut and paste job once you start looking a bit more closely.

That's not acceptable for a game of this scale and size.