I've never seen eminence do any amount of tangible healing, except on something like Dark Animus, most of the time in my raid mass blanket heals are being spammed and eminence is not fast enough/reliable enough to target anyone who needs healing (AKA the 20yd range severely gimps it).
It's also possible that I'm just terrible at placing my statue/myself, and highly likely.
Some of the few times I would WANT to eminence smart heal, is something like twins...but no one who needs the heals is in range of me or my statue, so it just heals the tank with the beast and kills me instead. (or it used to.)
It's dumb the statue has even lasted this long, now with this whole button bloat/event log spam becoming a concern it's all the more reason for it to go and have eminence's range actually worth a damn.
I don't know, I think its lovely that my eminence will reliably always heal pets. It makes me feel like my dps rotation helps keep the raid alive. One pet at a time. (It's all overhealing btw, if anyone doesn't catch my sarcasm.)
I'm not sure why the ranged version of eminence gets to be 40yd range, which can be easily spammed, but the one who worries about positioning (glances/parries/etc, I've had jab parried 4 times in a row .-.) and range has a 20yd range. There's a reason atonement is ridiculously effective and eminence sucks, why when you look at logs on smart heal fights atonement might actually be in the top 3 heals, but I've never seen eminence come close to that. Even for spot healing ReM/uplift is far far superior to eminence in most cases, which is just absurd. But complaining aside...wts jade serpent statue, it's absolutely terrible.
I'm normally assigned to position 3 or 23 (third on either side, basically) so I'm in range of:...two pets, and 4 players. So i put my statue near the center of everyone and end up manually keeping pets alive .-.