Where the Meta/Paradigm Problem Applies

[Rbstr]

A large part, I think, is that "Turtle meta" can't exist in the current game because there's hardly anything you can do with gear to take less damage. The only mitigation stat, parry, is junk.
We get to adjust HP and that's really it. You're certainly not "throwing caution to the wind".
You could make a tank buster require a tank to have fending accessories for survival but the nature of gear means that threshold will, over time with increasing ilevel, require fewer fending accs. Once you can survive strength is clearly more useful than more HP.
DPS checks also tend to be the hard parts to get down while doing mechanics, so that incentivizes strength stacking more.

I like hitting hard and I like tanking and I've ran as much strength as I could since I leveled war. But, fundamentally I think that's unfair, since tanks don't get to need on strength accs. and they're also the only class where the expensive crafted accs are seen as the "best" way to go.

Ultimately I agree that tanks should offer more "tanky" meta that gives actual DPS/Mitigation trade-offs. But they can't simply have it be that you need to carry different gear for different situations, especially when they can't roll "need" on half of it.
Plus any change really needs to retain the ability of tanks to do as much damage as they do now (proportionately to DPS classes) especially in solo and easy content. They're already lower population classes and it's anti-fun to make them do less damage.