I've always been a fan of clerics, at least once I got past the whole religious aspect. From a mechanical standpoint, the character who can heal damage and remove afflictions has always been pretty important. They've usually been a fair balance between martial and casting, too, since they could wield some decent weapons and had enough armor to actually wade into melee. Unlike the wizard, who was great whenever the situation warranted spending a spell slot but was otherwise just taking up space, the cleric could make a meaningful contribution every round without spending any resources to do so.
The 5E cleric has been a bit of a disappointment, mostly because the system got rid of the constraints which they were designed to overcome. Healing magic is kind of lame in a world where everyone can heal for 150% of their total HP everyday without even resorting to magic, and even significant afflictions can be healed naturally with a little downtime. Their martial prowess - previously second only to fighters - is now superfluous in the face of infinite cantrips and all of their many spell slots which are no longer needed for healing. Mechanically speaking, in terms of resource management and round-by-round decision making, a cleric is really just a wizard with a slightly different spell list.
If I was going to re-design the cleric for 5E, without overhauling the core game mechanics by removing Hit Dice entirely, then I would start by severely cutting their spellcasting and significantly boosting their Divine Strike feature. Give them fewer spells per day, get rid of half of their spell list, and let them add their Wisdom bonus to each extra damage die from Divine Strike.
