I think for our case in FF14, the Dead Ends could be compared to our most recent Lunarian 4 man dungeon. The final boss for the Dead Ends has quite a bit AoE damage. I could end it with a good amount of MP if I cycle almost all of the cooldowns, but I would definitely run more dry on mana if I used maybe just half the healing cooldowns. As for our most recent dungeon, it usually follows our 70 - 90% graphs for Dosis / Glare / Malefic / Broil spam. Most of the damage are telegraphed AoEs we can dodge. The unavoidable damage is comparable to a slap on everyone's face that is easily countered with a WHM's Assize that actually gains mana instead of using mana. I use Liturgy during the stack marker on me, but more so just because. I probably could have chosen Asylum and it would still be the correct answer since the next mech is yet another avoidable attack. Oh and did I mention the next 2 after that are also avoidable? lol The boss was trying to sound scary while I am yawning with my mana only being used to Glare spam him. Only thing that would actually kill at this moment would be the dreaded lag spikes.

As a conclusion, Bole appears to also be right that we had some over-corrections. The healing power from raising gear ilvl is so strong that I can't remember using Medica 2 ever once we got past the Dead Ends. Even when I did use it for the level 87 dungeon, the Thin Air cooldown negated the mana cost. All of our mana free cooldowns were usually sufficient to counter the unavoidable stuff. So in essence, it still factors in for our mana management that we barely ever have to touch our GCD mana heals.

As for SGE mana regen, one of my Savage player friends also joked about how we could just throw a random Druochole to a full health target in a 4 man and not care because we got our 7% mana, lol. Of course, I am talking about the middle of the patch cycle to our current end cycle.