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A few things that people are forgetting -
1, The new TBC encounters are being designed with this in mind. Slouken flat out said that, one of the motivators for this change was so that the encounter designers didn't have to take decursive like mods into account when designing encounters.
2. You won't have 40 players to look at - you'll have 25
3. Downranking is taking a hit - spells below level 40 will see far less benefit from +heal gear.
4. Player HP is scaling faster than any other factor in the game - this should give some breathing room for spot-healers.
5. While a clickable emergency monitor is not doable anymore, you can always have an emergency monitor (sortable) that has bright glowing pointers to the unit-frame of the affect person (meaning no hunt and peck). I'm already working on the animation code for something like that.
6. Slouken is looking into implementing a combo keys approach to keybindings (using the menubuttons) based on a lot of our feedback. Take a druid healing a single group for instance (this scales, btw) using just the keys 1-5. Pressing a key opens the UnitFrame's menu button and remaps the keybinds to those newly opened buttons (which are your heals), pressing another key casts the spell, collapses the menu (optional) and resets the binds.
1,1 = rejuvenation on you
1,2 = regrowth on you
1,3 = healing touch on you
2,1 = rejuve on party 1
and so on. Many of us have requested the functionality, and slouken wants to put it in. Slouken's been pretty good in the past about getting us things like this.
Now, some of this may take some time -- but the 2.0 client will be on the PTR (slouken has said so), even though we won't get to test the new content, we can test the new UI and write new addons to make healing better.
Before the "oh, you play a DPS class, you don't know squat" stuff comes up - My first main was a paladin (for the year between release and 1.9). All my first mods centered around staying aware of my party's (and then raid's) condition and simplifying executing the proper actions on them.
Along with smaller raids, and the fact that 44% of the classes are now healers, a different approach to assigning spot-heal responsibilities would reduce the amount of staring at health bars (and overhealing IMO) -- but that's not a programming discussion, that's a process analysis discussion.
I think the idea that so many healers should be watching an entire raid is misplaced - it contributes to healer stress and to overhealing. There are ways to reduce the number of people a healer is paying attention to that leave massive redundancy in coverage, and flexibility for when a healer dies.
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