At the end of the day, I've been forced to accept long-ago that Yoshi either doesn't have the interest, or the aptitude, to balance jobs that feel noticeably different to play outside of a handful of DPS (like Dancer or Ninja as examples of jobs that feels notably different) because with every year they seem to bemoan job differences in the Healer and Tank roles, which has basically culminated in that slide from the Live Letter presentation that may as well have said "We want to destroy any possible meta formations by streamlining these two roles to be more alike, and even easier to play, and also reducing instances of job synergy dramatically."
I fought this fight for years and at this point I have to just face the reality that my expectations (having played various MMOs for my entire life since I started playing games) of having differences and inherent imbalances between playstyles are not the same expectations that mainstream audiences have today. I've been conditioned to treat this game as a single-player game because anytime I think of it as an MMO I'm reminded of how shallow this game is mechanically, how limited the end-game content is, how the gear progression and encounter design is so conservative - but most people love it and their sub numbers have seemed to increase in the last few months, so I'm just the odd man out anymore. I've made my peace with my role as a healer in the game being increasingly simplified and I'll play for the story and the really great moment-to-moment gameplay, and maybe someday they'll decide to go in a different creative direction more to my tastes.
My glass-half-full look of the situation is that their conservative encounter design philosophy effectively making everyone in this game a DPS to some extent ensures that, without radically changing something, healers will always be able, and to some extent have to, DPS while in groups. Like a lot of things with healers the dev team kind of backed themselves into a corner where they don't like where healers are, but also have no ability to change it without ruining the role by making it incredibly boring, or fundamentally altering how combat encounters work. As expected it doesn't seem like they did either. But who knows. This whole conversation could be turned upside down once embargoes end.
