Healing surges were even worse, unless your goal of play was to plow through an entire adventure without having the PCs rest and recuperate very often. That, and I'm not a fan of in-combat healing as a regular thing.
There is nothing - repeat, nothing - wrong with a party taking several days or even a few weeks (or even a few months if there's lots of travel involved) in game time to get through an adventure; most of which time is spent resting. Or, as an alternative, there's also nothing wrong with having the healers use their spells to - horrors! - heal rather than to do other things (I think this is a lot of what broke the Cleric in 3e - they didn't need to save their spells for healing so instead could become buff machines).
Lanefan