Discipline Priests - I tire of the Blizzard hatred

So Blizzard have once again screwed with Disc Priests. Just announced in a blue post:

Priests

The cost of Power Word: Shield is being increased by 33%. While we wanted Discipline priests to be able to utilize this spell more often and with better results, we also did not want it to be the main spell (and often the only spell) used while in groups. We don’t find this to be a particularly compelling playstyle and have found that it encourages players to avoid using other spells such as Penance. We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don’t want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that.

We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent. The tooltip will not reflect this change until a future patch, however. Ideally, Holy priests should not notice much of a change to the Power Word: Shield costs.

OK I cannot attempt to not be blunt in the rest of this post - so this most likely NSFW. You have been warned.
Now let me think about this - priests come in three varieties - and to quote Blizzard themselves:

Priest talents can strengthen their ability to heal the wounded, endanger their foes with the power of Shadow, or empower themselves and others with protective prayers.

So in the above statement we are looking at Holy, Shadow and Discipline specs of the priest class. Disc is a spec for protection and mitigation rather than healing.

Now I've remained disc since Cataclysm - I can heal heroics (although I can't say it a particularly relaxing pastime), I can heal raids. But I cant remember the last time I bubbled anyone other than to get my haste buff or to get some mana back.

Shields (even when mastery buffed) mitigate fuck all damage. Just try and shield and PoM the tank on the pull and check when the 'zing' of PoM departing the tank first occurs. It will be under 2 seconds. And even with heal spams you are looking at eight seconds before being able to reapply a shield because of the weaken soul debuff. And trust me, if you are heal spamming to reduce the debuff, your tank's a gooey piece of meat on the floor before your shields back on anyway.

Disc heals are viable - don't get me wrong - greater heal, smite, PoH, PoM, heal - we have all the tools we need to be great healers. But what made disc healers different from all the other healer specs (resto druids, resto shammies, holy pallies and holy priests) was the fact we didn't heal just by topping up green bars of health. Shit anyone can do that crap - these days its just a matter of picking the right spell to make sure you get the job done in time and with mana to spare.

Obviously Blizzard decided that they didn't like the fact that they had created something different in a class. So they have decided to turn disc priests into another green bar filler. In short they have got lazy and just making disc a vanilla spec like all the other healing specs.

It's sad really. Having a different challenge as a healer was always what attracted me to disc. Protecting my fellow group members from damage seemed to be somehow more 'priestly' than just sticking another plaster on a cut to fix the problem.

If anyone can tell me what now differentiates a Disc priest from a Holy priest (other than the name of the spells we use) then I would welcome your input. By increasing the mana cost of shield application, which will nullify rapture in the most part, PWS purely becomes a haste buff. Well whoop-te-fucking-do to that.