"The most important thing is the fun factor, and a lot of people loved the rng and flavour of the cards."
No they didn't. It may have for a few, but this "lot of people" just kept spamming/throwing away the cards until the magic one or two appeared, or just ignored the card system and got on with healing people.

Now we have posts complaining about changing from the old system, while at the same time we have posts (based on 6.0) complaining about changing from the current system. Go figure..