@OP:

Let me tell you a thing: imho you are talking this way because you still are in the very early steps of the game, because, otherwise, you wouldn't think crimson fist is the worst one and azure fang the best one.

Why?

1) Crimson fist.

Crimson fist is actually the best supporting main there is, overall if we talk about full immune ninjas and is the best if not the only option for some of the current meta teams. Some examples?

a) edo hiruzen meta uses crimson fist because pose of duel is the only buff that stacks with edo hiruzen buff and both double standard mystery and shield mystery are what make it works.

b) kurama roshi meta uses crimson fist just because let it stack roshi and gives enough chakra to use both roshi and kurama in round 2 (try to put a kushimaru in front of a roshi that gets shielded every round while stacks defense. Or you kill it in round 1-2, thing wholly impossible on par power, or you are done for).

c) ag konan meta works on a comparable level if not better with crimson fist than with breeze dancer if your defensive stats are high enough because double standard let stack better hokage minato and let konan reduce cd as much as dance of impetus, but the shields let her survive in many more situations while they also boost her, so, if your konan is, de facto, stacked enough to be immune to move 2+ controlling effects, crimson fist could be a very op choice.

d) itachi susano'o, ag konan, madara: good luck beating it on par power if you use double standard mystery, giant katsuyu level 3 and super armor passive.

what you are, in general, greatly undervaluing is the usefulness of that shield standard attack (that is there every round) and of pose of duel + the 3rd line of passive he owns (the +def/+res one, the shields one, the super armor one and the +atk/+combo one, each one of them can be really op depending on the situation).

2) Azure fang

You are talking about how op azure fang is due to neurotoxin and is true.

Shark bomb with neurotoxin is actually annoying and is op against a ton of ninjas, but....

exist both avoiding ninjas and full immune ninjas and they are quite common and both of them put you in a very disvantage when you run azure fang as a damage dealer.

The reason why with next patch shark bomb gets boosted so that steals also chakra is because right now is too easy to deny her good side and scarlet blaze, the main that should be weak against her, is actually good against her because it's enough that neurotoxin is reflected back to water main itself to wholly disable her.

P.S. if you run a neurotoxin lineup you actually do not use 3rd chase, but 4th chase + koh/tortoise/crustacean and eventually bet on another ninja with a controlling chase triggered by shark bomb (like kurenai, pakura, mei or angel konan) to be sure to control the target you want.

the higher a ninja defensive stats are and the more significative a shield or healing becomes because they are flat quantities.

do not undervalue the effect of a shield.

if you have 12k atk/nin and 8k crit and you have in front of you a ninja with 8k def/res and 4k crit a 1200 shield will indeed appear as wholly useless, but if you are in front of a ninjas with 14k def/res, 12k crit and 3k damage reduction then that shield is the chinese great wall for you even if is still, the same, 1200 shield granted by an earth main with 12000 basic resistance.

shields are exactly like healings, just that they can stack, they can't be denied by ignition (but only by clearing effects) and that they have no upper cap.

i suppose this is enough as a reply

generally speaking yes, you are right, but there are a few exceptions for water main teams

considering that 3-4 rounds is the common length of a battle at comparable power that's more than enough (even if i hardly see a lineup with CF that is actually so bad made to be controlled fully for 3 rounds...)

anyways, maybe you are not considering the fact that ignition may be applied multiple times per round and that every time it fully negates the healings and is blatantly the reason why healings get boosters like healing tips (but are very rare...) while shields do not get boosters, they can only be removed.

in general the only teams with water main where you actually get fully advantage of the healings are full immune teams (and are the teams i was understating in my reply to tobei), in all the other cases healings are worse than shields (if we talk about endured damage) because ignition is simply too common while shield removers require, almost always, a direct choice from a player (except for han and edo yugito nii, but how many of them you see out there?).

that said, i don't understand why you consider those 1k shields as your touchstone. The most common situations with earth main are with boulder jutsu or with deep forest wall and you have to make the comparison with water main with regenerative healing jutsu.

If you use boulder jutsu you actually remove 1 layer of debuffs and you apply twice the shields so that 1-2k becomes 2-4k depending on your luck (but even here the luck is relative because the higher your combo is the higher the chance to get 20%, same thing with healing jutsu and the healing of two targets or with the chance that wind main summons 2 clones instead of 1, basically, at 10k combo you have almost 50% chance that that shields are 20% like you have *most 50% chance to heal two targets) and if you use deep forest wall you add another 5k shield (if you have 10k resistance) to up to 3 targets once every 3 rounds (exactly like once every 3 rounds you use regenerative healing jutsu).