Boring design

[Absurdity]

Is that not part of the problem, though? That SE doesn't want to make healers "feel" like they have to do DPS? And in that view, I'd guess that "more buttons" vs. "more animations" are just two sides of the same coin.

With the current design direction they pretty much are, because new skills are rarely anything more than either spammable filler or "press to do X potency" with either a gauge cost that you build up within 120 seconds or it's fire-and-forget with a divisor of 120 as a cooldown.