I can't say this topic is targeted at me because I have not legitimately played Scholar since its death when Stormblood ended, but it was my first job, and one of two jobs I played exclusively throughout ARR and the first two expansions, and I've kept well aware of the changes its suffered from the this expansion and the last.

The Fey Gauge is arbitrary. Hide it from your UI and nothing changes. There's no element of gameplay where the player actively aims to generate gauge nor decisions to make on how to spend it, and Aetherpact is a mid healing cooldown anyway.

What Scholar needs come 7.0 is at least a soft rework. Both Aetherflow and the Fey Gauge should be reevaluated to give each a clear purpose. As you said, you could very simply just kill the Fey Gauge completely and make Aetherpact cost Aetherflow instead and virtually nothing changes about the Scholar gameplay experience. Meanwhile Aetherflow continues to be in a weird position where the existence of Energy Drain creates a conflict of interest in how you use Aetherflow while simultaneously being the single modicum of choice Scholar is allowed to engage with, and thus removing Energy Drain doesn't feel good either. In addition to redesigning the gauges, Scholar also needs to stop having all of these internal caveats that disable your faerie.

What I've said before and continue to stand by is reworking Aetherflow to being an offensive resource and restore the more tactical offensive gameplay identity the job was born with. Meanwhile, the Fey Gauge should be your primary resource for healing tools, and in particular, make these tools more about your faerie. The Scholar is a DPS--an Arcanist who became a healer through the help of their faerie companion. The two of you are a team. The Scholar uses attack spells to generate aether in the form of the Fey Gauge that the faerie can then use to provide healing and utility to the team.