I can understand the rationale behind having HP and damage scale off of separate stats. Every role does this, irrespective of whether they're tank, healer or dps. The solution for tanks is identical to those other jobs: have gear pieces that boost both HP and damage. Left side pieces on all roles boost both. This is not controversial. For some reason, however, the right side is controversial for tanks, in spite of the fact that there's a working standard on every other role in the game.

If the main concern is that tanks won't have enough HP if you use a similar setup to other roles, you have two solutions. Either boost the HP contribution of left side pieces and keep the right side STR only, or make the accessories VIT + STR. If the main concern is that tanks will look at the right side STR contribution and clue into the fact that it's significantly lower than what you see on melee jobs, then just disguise the tank primary damage stat with a new name so that people can't tell that it's weaker. Or better yet, maybe make it so that new tank gear is marginally better than last expansion's dps gear? Either works.

But let's take a moment and talk about the elephant in the room. Players like dealing damage. Anyone who has played a Final Fantasy game previous to this one knows the joy of unlocking a flashy new ability only to unleash a sequence of "9999s" across the screen. There's something viscerally satisfying about it. That's why the devs very deliberately throw in ability combinations like IR into hexacleave, or Requiescat into Holy Spirit spam, or BW/Delirium into chain Bloodspillers, even on non-dps jobs. It's also the reason why every new expansion unveils a new, meatier Stone/Malefic/Broil (stay tuned for 7.0, for the grand reveal of Malefic 6, now with even higher potency and flashier lights). It's operant conditioning at work: press the button to feel good. What better way to draw people in?

The usual counterargument to this is that tanks mustn't concern themselves with dealing damage. It's not your job, you see. You ought to enjoy using your zero damage enmity moves, like a true pacifist. If you really wanted to do damage, shouldn't you really play a dps? This might as well translate to: "If you want to have fun, shouldn't you play a dps?" But perhaps telling the least played role that they ought to switch isn't a particularly good idea.

A lot of this sentiment comes from non-tanks, motivated by the fear that if your tank is doing dps, and your healer is doing dps, then what function do the dps play? So we introduce in discrepancies between the damage dealt by each of the roles and superimpose in systems like enmity to assuage the vocal majority and get everything to work out. But why is tank gameplay design being dictated by non-tanks?

So we run into this situation where tanks are forced to indirectly complain about enmity (which is a direct function of the discrepancy between tank damage output and dps damage output) because they aren't supposed to want to hit things very hard. Likewise, instead of recognising and admitting that these changes in 4.0 were made deliberately to widen the discrepancy between the roles (at the start of a new expansion no less, where the drop in dps is much less obvious to the average player than it would have been mid-expansion), we're talking around the point. Many tanks want to do more damage, and they're being blockaded at every turn in the name of preserving role distinctions within the tank/healer/dps trinity. It's actually pretty fortunate that the STR accessory situation panned out the way that it did, because it gave us a voice to be heard.

The bottom line is this. Some compromises are in order. Most tanks don't want to outdps pure damage dealers. But we also want to feel like our attacks count for something. We want to feel like our attacks get progressively stronger with higher levels of gear. There are many ways to resolve this equitably. But I think the starting point is in acknowledging that there are a significant portion of tanks and healers out there who are passionate about doing damage in addition to their other responsibilities, and instead of stymieing this, facilitate it.