What if Tanks were designed like Healers?

[ForsakenRoe]

It doesn't matter why SGE is the way it is, what matters is that it has always BEEN the way it is. This is the only incarnation it's had. It didn't lose anything such that jaded vets pine for getting it back. It doesn't have jaded vets who have played it since 3.0 or 2.0 or 1.4 (whenever Jobs were added to 1.X) who have gone through all the ups and downs and seen all the various iterations of their Jobs, what they lost and gained and lost other stuff to eclipse the gains. It doesn't have those jaded vets pining for what once was, or feeling betrayed by their Job moving away from what it once was, because it never was before this (6.0-Present) to have been "once was".

Instead it has jaded vets from other healers (WHM SCH AST mains) hoping that they can finally have some depth and complexity back, added via a new job (but that's acceptable as the monkey's paw bargain they have to make to get that depth), and instead it has the same amount of depth (or maybe even less in some regards) than what we've already got. The 'breath of fresh air' was just more of the same, and that's why people are jaded about it, not because of losing an older beloved incarnation

and to be fair, from the numbers I could find, SB was the lowest point of Healers, even lower than ShB, by percent of the playerbase

Is that the numbers that we have seen from Wayback Machine, that you yourself said 'probably is not reliable data', and even if it WAS reliable, showed that 'as a percentage of the total playerbase', HW or early SB (depending when the data was collected in the year) was the highest percentage we've had, even in comparison to today? Cleric Stance was not an issue because it forced people to do damage, it was an issue because it forced people to gimp their healing output in order to do damage. SB fixed this by making it a throughput CD, and having damage spells scale from Mind. There was zero reason to remove it and the damage GCDs we lost in the SHB transition beyond 'we want healers to focus more on healing' and they've shown they can't actually threaten competent players with healing requirements without completely boning the casuals