It's understandable in some senses, that the solution for 'make healer gameplay more fun' is 'make more healing', as it enforces the trinity. But the problem is, the trinity's already getting worn down by DPS having mitigations, Tanks having crazy selfsustain (not you DRK), Tanks getting more and more damage buttons despite not needing them for the sake of 'keep aggro' (aggro is now autopilot because tankstance is so strong), DPS getting more utilities that heal the party (curing waltz, phoenix, etc). So I think it's a case of the JP playerbase believing more strongly in the preservation of 'the trinity' than someone like me. I believe I can respect the stance, but politely disagree with it. We are a healer first and foremost, and that means that if we have to drop damage to heal and save the party, then we absolutely should do that. However, I also do believe that when there isn't damage to heal, we should have more that we can play around than just one DOT and one filler spell.

I wonder if the JP side has considered Abyssos, and it's effect on the raid population for each role. It would not surprise me too much if their stance was 'Okay you tried to make more healing required, but it didn't go so well. But we think that 'more healing required' is the way to make healer role more fun, so please try another approach to reach that same destination (eg, more fast-pace heal checks ala Barbariccia, rather than 'Mit this 4 times or you die instantly' Abyssos)'. Whereas here, we're more prone to 'You tried it, and it didn't work. Try something different, because clearly 'more healing' hasn't worked and you've got the evidence that it won't because you just tried it'. Something tells me that it's part of their culture to try to find a way to make something work, rather than giving up on it and trying a different direction right away. Eg, with the Pure/Barrier split, it's not really worked so well, but I expect it to stick around for a while longer, if not forever, because they'd rather 'try to make it work' than go back to the drawing board and change tact (eg making every healer have a sliding scale of Pure vs Barrier capability, where being good at one means they're bad at the other, and have to rely on one another to cover the gaps in their own kit during raids). I mean, look at Diadem, and how they never truly 'threw it away', but kept reworking it until it became 'passable content', and then iterated on with Bozja/Eureka.

Again, I respect that mentality and approach to a flawed system. But I also think that sometimes, you have to know when something's beyond saving, and personally I think that we need to look at adding more to the damage rotations for healers, for the inevitable downtimes we'll face in any level of content. And hey, the addition of 'more damage rotation' doesn't exclude the possibility to add more healing required later down the line. As a quick example, if we did the thing I've mentioned for a year, where WHM generates a new gauge by doing damage or non-Lily healing GCDs, and can spend that gauge on a damage-neutral AOE heal, then the addition of that not only adds some depth to the optimization for the class in the short term, but opens up the opportunity for more healing to be required in later expansions, because they have access to that healing tool. The mere addition of that gauge opens up opportunities for new skills that use that gauge. Maybe a shielding variant, maybe something that places a damage-neutral HOT on everyone (cough Purgation), maybe something that dumps the whole gauge and scales in power based on how much gauge was dumped. Maybe even something which costs the whole gauge, and is the equivalent of WOW's Holy Word Salvation, which in FF terms would be an AOE heal hits everyone with Cure 3, 6s of Medica 2 and a full duration Regen, with a 12min CD (reduced by 15s each time you spend a Lily). Long CD, but it's VERY strong and feels super cool and impactful

Additionally, as part of the 'remove the Pure/Barrier split, make it a sliding scale', I suggested adding an AOE shielding Lily spender to WHM. If every healer has some form of AOE Shield capability, then like how SE has made things like White Hole, Charybdis, Heartless Archangel, True Walking Dead, etc, moves where you have to 'blast Pure healing in a short timeframe' (effectively a 'pure heal check'), we could have a new 'Shield Check' style of mechanics, where you can 'block' something by having a shield active. A good example already exists in any instance of Ifrit, including UWU where it was the required solution at the time: Vulcan Burst's knockback only applies if you take damage from it. If you fully shield through it, the KB is negated. So we could have, for example, a raidwide that applies a Bleed. You can block the damage with a shield to prevent the bleed, you can Esuna the bleed (making a return of an AOE Esuna skill have some interesting use cases), or you can just power through the bleed with additional HPS. Giving parties multiple options, and therefore more agency, on how to deal with the mechanic

wow that's long sorry, never 'let samantha cook' when it comes to game design, it turns into a metaphorical 3 course meal every time