[Kromm]

The successive -3 is a way to prevent infinite healing at zero resource cost. If the party can heal fully after every battle, with the only cost being downtime to recover FP afterward, they'll turtle up after each clash until everyone has full HP and FP. Sitting around like that is boring; not having to ask "How many Healing spells can we safely cast?" and "How many healing potions can we afford?" (they aren't cheap) eliminates important decisions; and never having to enter battle wounded means there's no such thing as being worn down (which among other things makes fodder monsters pointless, as they can neither drain resources nor become dangerous in their own right to a sufficiently tired party). In short, the penalties serve the purposes of drama.

If you disagree with those assumptions, you can change them!

But as others have said, I'm wondering whether the issue isn't to do with how individual characters were built and/or how the party was put together. In my experience, you usually have a couple of healers in a party – or one healer with spells and Faith Healing. Those using spells go for better than baseline skill to absorb the penalties, plus enough Power Investiture to exploit Talent and Effect. Faith Healing has the penalties but is open-ended on HP healed, so the healer can dump FP and ER to fix almost anything. Lesser scratches are handled with First Aid. If there's a barbarian, that person snags Very Rapid Healing. And nobody has the cash to blow through healing potions . . . those are held in reserve for when the healers are rolling at such huge penalties that critical failure is assured.

But I suppose it's possible to have a party with just one understrength cleric who's counting on Power Investiture 3 and Major Healing-14 for everything . . . and where everybody traded quirk points for extra gold and bought 20 minor healing potions. As long as the players chose that, though, I'm not seeing a problem. The player of the cleric opted to be something other than a heal-bot – maybe that person prefers smiting and turning – so the "healer" niche isn't being invaded because it was never selected. And the other players enabled this choice by using their points for potions instead of durable gear or abilities, so they have no room to complain about their "sucky healer."