Provoke underwhelming?

[Kitru]

SWTOR's taunt for example made any enemy taunted glued to you for 6 seconds, giving you time to build threat and working just fine for a tank swap.

Actually, SWTOR's taunt rendered the entire threat subgame a complete joke (which the devs actually intended) because it provided you with 30% of total current threat even if you were already tanking the target. After about 30 seconds, you could just spam taunt for the rest of the fight and have more than enough threat.

The fact that Provoke provides the exact amount of enmity required to get aggro and nothing else is one of the things that makes the enmity subgame at least marginally interesting. The way Provoke is implemented, you can't just use Provoke on its own; you have to use Provoke in conjunction with something else, which, given that it's an off-GCD ability, isn't all that hard. Provoke's lackluster performance is, in my opinion, a good thing. It means that there isn't a single "I win" tanking button.