"I've spent too much time standing there, my judgement and crusader strike on cooldown without enough holy power to do anything, just waiting a couple of seconds in the middle of a fight."

Yup, you nailed it. If nothing procs and you don't have holy power then you're just standing there auto-attacking, it's boring. There should at least be some filler attack to use in those situations, like most (all?) other classes have.

and this whole time i thought i was just sucking it up on the ret changes... good to know that there are unintentional breaks.

A very good summary of how I feel about ret too. A lot of proc-y things to react to, which is not entirely bad, but when they don't come up, you're left stranded.

And I just can't get used to Excorcism and Divine Storm being on the same cooldown.

I've been in the same situation of perpetual auto-attack before too, but Blue Posts in the past have argued that if we can't stand to be idle for a few seconds on occasion, then it's a problem with us, not the spec.

On the one hand, I agree that we don't need to be button-mashing every GCD, but there needs to be some way of compensating for lulls in the flow of combat, maybe by attaching HP generation to more skills, as another person here suggested.