I've been mulling this over for a few days now, and I finally have something meaningful to contribute to the discussion. I'll apologize in advance, because this doesn't address any of the conversations that have been had to this point; I've been focusing on the original wording and what it might mean.

Right now, a lot of people are afraid of this. Changing something as fundamental as our damage calculation has potential to rock gearing paradigms to the core, and to change how we play our jobs. It could also represent a shift in encounter design as well, depending on what the change in question is. This could either be a simple change, or it could be a deep change, and both of those present different levels of "threat" as regards to our current way of tanking (which is a dividing point for tanks right now). But change itself is not a bad thing. Indeed, this could be a way to bring all of our concerns into line, and we don't really have any clarity into what the developers mean with this change. But whatever it is, we'll find out in a week and a half.

But whatever it is, we don't need to be afraid of it. Stat priorities change all the time, and that is something that is basically a constant in the context of an MMO. If tomorrow a prominent theorycrafter was able to irrefutably prove that Dex is The God Stat for DRK, then DRKs might bemoan their gearing choices to date, but they'd all switch to Dex gear and move on. Because that's what we do as tanks.

Right now, the damage paradigmmeta exists because it's what tanks needed to do in A3S and A4S in order to be successful in early runs. Tanks who participate in the damage meta are going to have higher success in those fights than tanks that gear and play to the survivability meta. Some tanks love doing more damage, and enjoy not having to struggle under the crushing weight of heavy incoming boss damage (and also enjoy perfectly timing their cooldowns and stance dancing), but others dislike it, and think it's not what tanking should be. There have been numerous discussions to this effect, and both sides are right in their arguments--it's a matter of personal preference. But to play the game, tanks do what they must do to be successful, and so right now, the damage meta prevails.

Let me say that again: tanks do what they must do to be successful.

It doesn't matter if 3.1 comes around and suddenly tanks need to figure out how to stack Intellect in order to succeed, because if that's what we need to do, it's what we'll do. We may not like it, and we may take to the forums asking for a change, but we'll do what it takes to succeed. And I have a little bit of faith that Yoshi P and SE have at least some idea what they're doing here, and that it will make sense when it comes around.

Honestly, the part of this that really seems off to me is that this seems like a response to the fact that tanks are preferring Slaying to Fending in all gearing content, and that they haven't listened to the community that has identified the source of that mentality. We're saying pretty clearly that it's a problem of high-end encounter design that's having a trickle-down effect, or at the very least a problem with tanking stats, or stats on gear in general, and instead of tweaking either of those things, they're (probably) changing our DPS stat priority to align with our survival stat priority. And that they don't seem to be listening to our well-reasoned ideas doesn't quite sit right with me.