I've been a new player at the start of the Stormblood expansion.I picked AST to play as my main... i stopped playing the job after a week or two after i had hit the 70lvl... Wall to wall tanks were a plague for a new players... especialy as a Healer

- I remember SB AST card game goal was just chasing for the BALANCE card and believe in RNGsus... and it was an headhache sometimes. Don't you remember this :"Damn..should i keep this BOLE card for the next tank buster ? what if i get a SPIRE if i redraw ? But i could get a BALANCE too !" (and some dps died while you were pondering)... you redraw a card and get an EWER ...
- Let's be honest ... BOLE, SPIRE, EWER were just card you used for royal road.. and sometimes.. really rarely you used the cards for their effect... i'm not even talking about SPEAR and ARROW cards that were just seen as bad draws.

I gave up AST for WHM and things became way more easier without that damn RNG card game.
But let's talk about the Shadowbringer expansion. I've played WHM mostly.. but i decided to give the new AST a chance, and i found the job far better to play. The card game is more instinctive and i've never been brainfucked by it since. There's still bonuses to play the card game but it's no longer bound to RNG.. (thanks to the new minor arcana)
So yeah, for me the new AST rocks. But i understand others may not enjoy it.

I think we could come back to unique card effects as long as we keep minor arcana to switch the card to a dps buff. But the dev team wanted some kind of balance between the healers, maybe it would be really unbalanced with these cards.

oh and btw.. i never met any difficulties in healing as an AST for now.. even with dumb tanks that dont use their mitigation tools or dps seeking death in AoE for that position strike they need.. The only issue may be the MP cost of nocturnal spells (diurnal are fine) but nothing that some Piety melding can resolve.