I joined in August 2014, shortly before patch 2.3 dropped. I mained SCH until sometime in late HW, when I switched to AST, which I then mained until the end of SB. So yes, I healed for the first five years of my time in FF14. I did not raid Savage then, nor do I raid Savage now. But the things I did run, dungeons, normals, and 24-mans, were a lot more fun to heal in ARR and HW than at the end of SB.
If you're upset about the healing role being made into "something it has never been," take that up with CBU3. They are the ones who design raids that require healer DPS to meet the enrage timer. They are the ones who pushed all your healing off the GCD, leaving you with nothing to spend your GCDs on except DPS. They are the ones who are deathly afraid of the attrition healing model. It's the devs who effectively turned the role into Green DPS with a piss-easy rotation, not us. And you're upset that we're asking for the rotation to not be piss-easy anymore.
Would WoW-style attrition healing be better? Sure! But this game never had that, not even in ARR, and CBU3 isn't going to redesign a full decade's worth of content to make that change.
(Edited to add: I also would settle for having AST's old SB-era card system back, and other healers being given support/buffing gameplay of similar complexity. That is very much something that "healers have been" in this game, considering that it was in the game until ShB.)
How is it a "conflicting stance" to push for a return to the DPS complexity that we had back in the day? Pushing for a return to the DPS complexity we had in ARR and pointing out that healers in ARR were able to handle said DPS complexity is not a "conflicting stance," that's supporting evidence. Especially given that healers were much more comfortable DPSing by the end of SB, when those jobs still had their greater DPS complexity, and before their oGCD healing kits got bloated in ShB and EW, because the game was better-understood in SB than in ARR. Citing examples of players of a new MMO not fully understanding the fight design in that MMO all the way back in First Coil, does not address the fact that by SB, healers were perfectly able to juggle those DoTs and do DPS just fine.