I agree that spending money on a cleric is dumb. Play better when a cleric is in the party and you won't get killed and the cleric won't blow all his money keeping bad players alive.
I think one reason that most clerics don't have devotion items is that they seem to be somewhat rare. The second reason is that people put them on the auction house on Ghallanda for 1 million gold. DOH!!!! If a cleric can't afford to buy some wands or scrolls what chance do they have of affording a devotion item? Superior Potency is another good fill in for devotion because it also will help out blade barriers and comet fall and damage spells, but the problem with the auction house is that people price these items out of reach and then wonder why clerics burn through spell points.
It's simple economics. People can't buy what they can't afford. That's why clerics don't have superior devotion and why clerics can't heal for hooey. I'm still using the same crappy Superior Potency V dagger I've had since level 9 and haven't been able to find or afford better. One will eventually drop and then I'll have some good mass cure spells launching too. Please don't say the economy in DDO is hosed because that's mental. The economy is the way it is because people will pay more for an item than it is really worth. If you refuse to pay the prices the prices will drop to a reasonable level.
Cleric's also have a problem when it comes to raids. It seems like 9 times out of ten all of the fighters are on the party list that doesn't correspond to a F1-F6 hot key. That means you have to disengage the mouse look and click on bars. That's a pretty bad UI design flaw. It shouldn't get orders of magnitude harder to heal a party in a raid, but it is.
An additional problem is people don't view all things as being equal. For example if a sorcerer gets in a party and they said I'm only going to use scrolls of firewall on the wraiths, specters and so on people would say, "ARE YOU NUTS? Your damage output isn't going to be as high." Now when a cleric says, "I'm only gonna use wands to heal," People are likely to say, "You better bring some extras because this could get messy." People are incorrectly thinking that wands are good for healing but bad for damage. The truth is that they are worthless period. The wand enhancements are worthless and 10% of nothing is nothing. I've only ever taken that enhancement because I needed to spend a point to get a better enhancement and the other stuff was even more worthless.
Another problem clerics have is that when they're in a party, the parties collective IQ drops. People start to play like idiots when they think the healing is going to come cheap. I've been in so many parties where there wasn't a cleric and they play careful and get the quests done, but as soon as a cleric shows up they turn into instant retards and run all over the place. Clerics = Crummy Play.
So it seems like if people played as careful with a cleric as they did without, then it wouldn't be expensive to play a cleric at all. How many times have you been in a group where you couldn't get a cleric and people finally get impatient and want to play and everyone says let's just go without a cleric and we'll just take it slow. HOW STUPID IS THAT? It's basically implying that if there is a cleric in the party you're all going to zerg like mad. Play like you don't have a cleric even when you do and then this won't be a problem for anybody.
I rolled one up in the heat of a cleric "depression" on Ghallanda and capped him so fast it was ridiculous. Now I only play him to do raids and occasionally when the guild needs him. Playing a cleric taught me one thing. On my melee characters and casters I always have 50-100 cure serious pots.