Please don't state such opinionated offerings as fact - your "facts" are *wide* open to argument.
If you're talking balance, it looks to me like clerics have plenty of firepower spell-wise, better weapons and armour to compensate for where druids have the edge on the offensive due to shapechanging or nifty spells, and fulfil an important niche in the party.
I think that druids would definitely see more play if they fulfilled such a niche, and there's plenty of space in the healing niche to share. The design team seemed to pump up the cleric because the healing expectation is such a spell-wasting burden in most parties. Arguably they already fulfil a niche of their own - the druidic niche - but it is a dispensable one in most parties. Healing (in some form) usually isn't.
There is no reason I can see why druids shouldn't have just as much healing potential as clerics - their weapon restrictions have been admitted by the designers as arbitrary (they're there for flavour) and many of their abilities are terrain specific. Even if this unbalances them, it can be compensated for by toning them down elsewhere.
I think you're confusing the druid's goals with the methods they use to pursue it. I suggest reading the Moonshae trilogies and the 2nd ed Druid's Handbook for examples of a diversity of both motivations and techniques for pursuing aims that differ from druid to druid. One druid might deal with the same problem by negotiation, another by using offensive spells to kill farmers, and a third by using damage control spells to regrow trees and bring back animals.
I gather from sources such as these that D&D druids don't just sit back and take it when an ecosystem is at stake; they intervene. That's what their powers are for, IMO. Your passive-aggressive example of "let them overcome their own wounds" is impractical when druids are forced into action and need to aid their allies - which is quite often considering the forces arrayed against their aims and charges.
Any good druid knows that when push comes to shove, healing, growth and nurturing are as important and potent a force as savagery and destruction. To take this out of their toolkit denies them utility that is very much inside their sphere of influence, as far as I can see. Consider a druid healing elven allies in defense of a natural cause, or healing animals after a natural disaster such as a bushfire. In the bushfire example, one druid might let nature take it's course and let the animals die. Another might recognise that such inaction represents the end of the forest and take action.
No, I don't think that this is a change that will ruin the flavour of druids, such as adding metal armour might.
Even a cursory examination of druids shows that they are just as much about creation as destruction - not "mostly destruction, a bit of creation and nurturing on the side". As I've stated before, there are no reasons I can see that a cleric of a god of money should be a better healer than a druid.
It seems that druids can invoke the powers of nature on their allies and speed up their recovery to an extent, but not well enough at the moment to truly support a party in the same way as a cleric can. There are compelling playability reasons why I feel that this aspect of the class should have been emphasised more than it was.
Your example carries no more water than mine, and mine has a lot of playability merit, IMO - and no, druids won't steal cleric's thunder by doing this; they'd simply provide a flavourful alternative to forcing clerics into nearly every party out there. And that would enhance the game, I'd think. I hope it will get fixed by 4th ed, if we ever see that edition.
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