Has anyone quit healing?

[Renathras]

...

Some they've changed over time, but many were left alone. For example, Haukke Manor didn't have to be changed, nor did most dungeons. Guildhests haven't been touched since they were implemented. The changes that were made were global. For instance, the boss crit change was probably a global change applied to all "boss" class/flagged monsters in the game code, so wasn't them going back and individually changing it on each past enemy. Moreover, the Healing model was changed in SB, not HW, which is when many of the changes were made at which point the content hasn't been touched since. They haven't made continual changes with each change to the overall game paradigm for Healers, of which there have been roughly three (one part-way through HW, one with SB's launch, and one with ShB's launch). So the idea they have to keep updating old content to reflect changes isn't borne out in the game's actual history.

As to the rest:

Healing already feels awful. Nothing feels good about pressing one button and it fully topping off the party. The only time that feels good is if it's some really big CD (like old school MMOs that had 1 hour or more "big CDs") or if it's a combination of abilities to generate large effects (Recitation + Adlo + Deploy or in ShB, Plenary Indulgence + Think Air + Cure 3 x5). What feels even worse is when it's an oGCD weaved between damage spells, so you don't even feel like you're healing anymore, you just feel like a bad DPS.

On the DPS checks - the entire point of any change is that the Enrage model would need to be adjusted. It arguably already needs to be adjusted anyway, since a clear or not clear can sometimes be decided by if your GNB got Double Down crits or not, regardless of Healer damage output.

On MP consumption - same thing. You don't make changes like this in vacuum. If Healers were designed to GCD heal, then MP management would actually be an important feature of the design, including having MP regeneration tools and having a tradeoff between more MP efficient but less HPS efficient heals vs more MP expensive but more HPS heals.

And we wouldn't be doing any of this with Ifrit EX. The number of people that try to no-echo sync the fight is already a tiny subset of the playerbase as it is. Moreover, that's what traits like Maim & Mend are designed to address.

Devs have - to date - never once said that Healer DPS is "baked into the check". The only time we have a statement from them, it was from HW and them saying it was not. You can argue it is, but you cannot make a statement of fact that it is. And that is, again, a tuning issue, not a design issue. If Healers were expected to heal more, than DPS checks - if they're based on Healer damage contribution now - would be reduced to account for that. "But what happens when Healers don't have to GCD heal anymore?!", I hear you ask. "You mean when content is two patches old and people outgear it? How's that different than now?"

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you could argue that a lot of jobs at this point have little, if any, risk/reward system. DRK had Dark Arts and Darkside, but that's been thrown out for the skin of a Marauder. SAM's Kaiten gave you a little flashy animation that lead into the iajutsu animation really well AND made it more damaging as a reward for even attempting to do the rotations properly, but now it's Shiten spam with no sort of damage feedback aside from "you're doing damage". and that's just the more obvious examples, barring Healer's themselves. there's not even a feeling of a reward, it's just empty in the end.

Pretty much this. Yes it's especially bad on healers and has been for 3 years now, but this is an issue that is gradually creeping into all job design.

SE clearly hates risk/reward and for there to be any gap between someone mastering their job and someone just spamming buttons, so they slowly rework every job to just spam buttons.
Call me cynical but I expect this to only get worse in 7.0, after all there can't be a skill gap if the ceiling is also the floor.

Basically these, yeah. People act like Healers are bad and every other role and Job is so much better. They...really aren't.

We seem to be at the point where we may have to just accept the direction the devs have taken healers and how the role clashes with the game's design. They really could just remove healers and spread some of the abilities across the support DPS classes like Dancer and Red Mage at this stage, sadly.

I feel like there is the hybrid solution, but outside of that, yes. People seem not to get that, and so actively fight against the solution that might give them some of what they want. I can't see them ever removing Healers, though they could arguably replace them with an overall Support role (since, god forbid an MMO adds an actual fourth "Support" as a full on role... <_< ), but there's no way they're going to do that.

I think Yoshi P has no idea what a good solution is, either, since they get all the conflicting feedback and there's no way to square that circle when one side of the equation is actively insisting the other side either doesn't exist or shouldn't be playing the game (or parts of it), which the dev team obviously doesn't see as an acceptable answer.