I feel like most of my complaints about AST aren't actually about AST, at this point, so much as the entire combat reboot. I have yet to find a job where the gauge is preferable to the buffs we had before (I can't quite at-a-glance RR anymore because numbers and a percentage require reading vs just picture representation.) It tentatively looks like anything that lives in the gauge doesn't appear in the combat log for other people, so there's absolutely no way for anyone to tell what's going on. That means even in raid logs you can't see cards, you can't see AF/UI uptime, you can't see if somebody forgot GB for an extended period, etc. If this holds out, RIP using fflogs to compare rotations and optimize. The job gauge is simplification gone too far and feels like something that should have been caught in play testing. But it seems like it's annoying for a lot of jobs, not just AST.
The reduction of DPS skills falls in there too--Combust II, Malefic III and Gravity do not a solid DPS rotation make, but that again seems to be more the Stormblood Combat Revamp than AST specifically. Sleeve Draw, Minor Arcana, and Earthly Star add more fidgety stuff to do between GCDs eventually, but the solo experience is pretty dreadful.
That said I'm not sure how far you are but in the short term there should be more inbound damage shortly if you're mostly healing random tanks. DEF/MDEF scaling in SB is pretty insane--i130 tank at 50 to i270 tank at 60 was like 900 def bumped to 2,290. i300 tank at 70 is over 4600 if they're stacking Tenacity, so under geared tanks while leveling should start getting hit pretty hard once you hit dungeons with gear expectations over 270. It's not going to be sustainable, but at the moment the EXDR dungeons have some trash mobs that can hit an i300 tank for over 20k in a single attack so at least there's that to look forward to. Makes using Lady and Earthly Star to actually heal at least a little more entertaining.
I think AST made out best of the healers in terms of actual new skills, but WHM probably ended up in the most interesting place for solo healer DPS in large part because of what they already had.