[GW's explanation of mistweaver design]
“We’ve changed Eminence from working on auto-attacks, since this would encourage monk healers to auto-attack just for those heal procs. Regarding our “vision” for the spec (in terms of PvE), it is currently (and this could change, of course):

Melee healing MistweaverYou position your statue near the ranged to heal them, and you are in melee. Your rotation is similar to a Windwalker’s, except you spread Renewing Mists out and Uplift during AOE phases. For AOE, you use Spinning Crane Kick and one of the last tier talents. You almost never cast Soothing Mist, Enveloping Mist or hard cast a Surging Mist unless you absolutely have to. If something doesn’t deal damage, you don’t want to cast it.
Ranged healing MistweaverYou aren’t in melee, you’re at range. You may position your statue near the melee since they’re farthest away. You mostly cast Soothing Mist since your statue also casts it with you, and burn through your Chi with Enveloping Mist. While moving you put down Healing Spheres near people you think may become injured (or on top of those who are). If you want to add in some damage, cast Cracking Jade Lightning. Cast Renewing Mist whenever it’s up. Roll/Chi Torpedo into injured members and use Spinning Crane Kick to heal them up. Use the Chi you generate through Spinning Crane Kick on Uplift.

Also, depending on the fight, you can switch between both of those modes (using Transcendence to teleport back and forth into melee). There will inevitably be encounters where one is better than the other, and we feel that’s okay. That is going to the life of a Mistweaver Monk.”

The fact that the mistweaver design is for you to be able to do this any time you want, at your leisure without leaning on a cooldown.

I hope there's more druid love to come from the devs.

~ Melyanna

Whether this talent turns out to be competitive will come out in the math but this is how the back half makes sense to me conceptually. Of course that doesn’t help healing raiders like you but that’s what makes streamlining druid talents difficult. They need to provide something competitive and interesting for all 4 roles in both pvp and pve. That’s a higher design bar than many other classes have.

Now there is also wanting to play this way and wanting not to play this way, and that’s why there are options. But what I find troublesome from the specialist camp are the declarations that “druids don’t want this” and “the last thing a resto wants to do is shift to cat and be in melee range”. I want to do this, I really like cat Dps far more than caster Dps, and I love melee range. Am I not a druid?

There is also the issue of are the numbers meaningful enough to matter, and that is a serious issue. But I think as the devs have stated we are still in the “is this fun?” Stage of beta, balancing the numbers comes later. And what scares me are all these calls of its not worthwhile now so scrap it. Now to be fair the purpose of your series is to find fixes to druid issues and that is awesome but lets please be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of it doesn’t work in my world therefore its not viable.

Your experiences are vastly different from mine as far as that goes – and I don’t know if that’s a difference between Heroics and Normals or 10 vs 25 (you will have to forgive me, I don’t know what your raid experiences are). When we learned Ultraxion, I was one of two healers healing 25 people when the encounter started. There was no wiggle room to DPS and I certainly had plenty to heal. When we learned Spine, there was an abundance of healing to be done to clear off Searing Plasma and keep the tanks alive during the later plates. If we needed more DPS on something that our DPS couldn’t push through, we generally just brought fewer healers if that was an option. If we couldn’t, or didn’t want to, bring fewer healers, we asked our DPS to step it up.

But in the past three raid tiers in Cataclysm, I can’t really think of any point where there wasn’t something to be healed and my mana wasn’t better spent healing. This is even more true when they changed symbiosis to harmony. The only times I think I’ve ever actively done DPS is when we are falling apart and have 1-2% left of a bosses health.

As far as being in a school of thought were I feel my role is healing, and I shouldn’t need to DPS, I will fully admit that I am pretty firmly of that mindset. I don’t want to have some clunky mechanic that requires me to do things outside of healing – I want to heal. If I didn’t want to be a healer, I would have rolled a different class or I wouldn’t be playing resto. I, personally, don’t find having to mix DPS and healing to be “fun”. I will also openly admit that I’m a competitive healer and if there is any amount of damage being done, no matter how much or how little, I’d much rather be healing the minimal damage going out to the raid than offering relatively weak DPS.

If you enjoy DPS with your healing, that’s fine, and you are welcome to DPS until your heart is content. But it’s not a style of play that sits well with everyone, and it’s not “wrong” for a player to want to be a pure healer. Druids who don’t want to integrate DPS into their playstyle to be effective shouldn’t be forced to do so (and yes, I recognize we have several options that don’t require us to DPS, I’m just making a broad statement).