I'm with mr. Snark. A true City of Heroes Empathy defender isn't a healer. Not in the same way as has been popularized in other games. Back in the olden days of CoH, the dislike Shen is refering to was an influx of poorly built, healing aura-on-auto, I'll be popular since I'm a healer kind of players.
The true empath in CoH was rocking RA and fortitude and was held in very high regard by most every team.
My own newbie thing is proabably the fact that I made the misstake of ranking empathy over every other defender build. I'm cured of that now I think, since I have loads of defender but no one empath. Might be the next thing for me...
//Jack