Way ahead of you: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...60#post5137360
That's from 2019, where I stated on the 150+ page "healer quit thread" that I had stopped healing and switched to a DPS main, and explained why. The short version is that I was an AST main who was...unhappy, to put it mildly, about the changes to AST's card system in ShB. AST always had the same 21111111 DPS rotation that all healers have today, and we AST mains wouldn't have wished that on our worst enemies. But the old card system, with its decision tree and interactions with the rest of the kit, made downtime engaging enough that the 2111111 spam was bearable.
The Job Guide tells me that as of EW, AST's cards buff damage by 6% for 15 seconds. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo. You know what you could do under the old pre-ShB system? Balance under Enhanced Royal Road, into Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition, to give the best DPS in your dungeon run almost fifty seconds of +20% damage. If you also held a Balance in reserve, you could put that on the other DPS and give them 34 seconds of +10% damage at the same time, for an absolutely monstrous opener. You could hold an Ewer in 8- or 24-mans in case you saw your co-healer dying a lot and needing to get back into the action, casting it either on yourself to restore MP you used up rezzing, or on your co-healer so that they can start rezzing. Got a tank that doesn't know what a defensive CD is? Enhanced Bole is a Rampart you can cast on the tank. There were flaws, sure, but those could've been addressed without nuking the card system from orbit as CBU3 did.
Players posted a lot of suggestions about how things could be improved. ty_taurus came up with a perfectly good card system that addressed the complaints about the randomness of the pre-ShB cards. Other players proposed changes for other jobs, ranging from just giving SCH its damn DoTs back, to devising entire new kits and synergies for the healer jobs. And CBU3's response was to ignore healer complaints, tell people to "go play Ultimate," aggressively dumb down and homogenize healers even more, double down on the godawful "pure vs. shield" split that was never actually a thing, and make the role redundant in anything below EX by giving tanks ever-increasing amounts of self-sustain.
So is it any wonder that healers are pushing back even harder now? We tried leaving feedback, and we were ignored.