MNK, DRG, and NIN represent a trade-off of personal dps against damage buffs which boost raid dps. Tanks have one damage buff which boosts raid dps: Storm's Eye. It also happens to be on the tank with the highest personal dps. This is probably the main reason why you will see at least one WAR in every group. There are a lot of other quality of life features on the job that make it very comfortable to play, but tanks would find a way to work around having those if it conferred a raid dps advantage to do so.

It's harder to compare the value of a defensive ability or a utility buff to this, because you're comparing apples with oranges. A stoneskin cast from a PLD could free up a bit of extra healer dps. Then again, it might not. You could both end up shielding the same target (too many cooks spoil the broth: if you thought overwriting buffs was obnoxious with two healers, try doing it with a wannabe third). You could be paired with a healer who isn't taking advantage of the dps window that you're offering them. There's no hard and fast rule that says that a given defensive action provides a raid benefit.

This is part of the issue with PLD at the moment. PLD has access to some of the most powerful defensive and utility buffs in the game, which in turn gets balanced against its dps. These can be very situational. But when they do work, they can be very useful in progression, sometimes allowing you to trivialise or bypass mechanics. Once you and your group outgrow those defensive crutches, however, you're free to swap out to a higher dps tank. The majority of this fights this tier were physical, but they weren't tuned tightly enough to make PLD progression cheese necessary (that, and the fact that Reprisal's timings worked out extremely well for A11S).

I know that this is mainly a PvE discussion, but it's interesting to note that the same bag of gimmicks seems to have made PLD into a preferred tank for PvP, while DRK is relatively unused. Burst is more important in PvP, placing PLD and DRK on similar offensive footing. But their defensive and support capabilities are not similar. Their interrupt kits are not similar. You can't blindly give the three tanks identical offensive capabilities without consideration for their utility, interrupts, defensive and invincibility moves.

The offensive side of things is fairly straightforward. The defensive/utility side of things is a veritable mess.

Quote Originally Posted by Jpec07 View Post
To me, the ultimate tank design meta was WoW patch 4.3, where tanks did a good chunk of damage, but also had a lot of reason to be tanky (where "good tanking" meant holding aggro, positioning bosses/mobs well, navigating mechanics, mitigating tankbusters, and gearing for CTC). Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part to hope SE will move closer to that. Mind, that's just my opinion, so if we don't move that way, I may be sad, but I probably won't complain.
There's no problem as long as you have the ability to play aggressively, the ability to play defensively, and as long as the game constantly forces you to make decisions between the two. Weaker tanks either blindly keep tank stance on or blindly turn it off. It has to be a conscious decision based on your knowledge of the fight. I think part of the problem is that once people start to overgear content, you can pretty much stay out of stance of the entirity. But this is going to be a problem regardless, because you need to make it so that tanks of all skill levels can clear... eventually.

The most interesting element to tanking for me is effective movement and positioning. It also has the highest skill ceiling, although the auto-attack changes softened this somewhat. We're seeing a lot more fights which require movement, which in turn has made tanking a lot more fun.