What is the General Consensus?

[Chrono_Rising]

Pld had nearly all off that available in 3.0 and a greater stranglehold on knockbacks as there was not a plethora of anti-knockback actions. They have been defensive powerhouses for ages and had more utility than every other tank at all stages of 14 history. Yet still it has both risen and fallen based on DPS.

This completely ignores all context of Heavensward to try and prove a point that is utterly ridiculous. Lets fill it in here so that we have some semblance of reality left.

Cover: redirected physical damage only in HW. In SB this was turned into redirecting physical and magical damage and mitigating it at 20%.

Divine Veil: This existed in heavensward. So why is it good now and horrible back then? Because it was a 10% shield every 2 minutes. What did this compete with? 10% magical mitigation up 100% of the time, 10% damage down which could be kept up as much as you want, and another 10% damage down in the form of reprisal that you could get up 50 to 60% of the time. Yes, Paladin also brought a strength down on its aggro combo, but to put that up meant giving away damage, it didn't make sense to use this.

Thats all the utility that paladin had, one was useless and buffed to usefulness. The other was completely obliterated by dark knight and warrior. Divine veil is useful now that those skills are out of the game/role actions for all tanks.

Defensive options. Yes Hollowed was still OP. But the meta back then was to have your warrior OT as much of the fight as possible and push your main tank to mitigate the majority of the damage unless you wanted to use HG. Paladin could only block physical damage, saddly the majority of tank busters were magical. This mean paladin had only 2 defensive options while dark knight brought 3, one of which was on an extremely short cooldown that could be boosted to shadow wall levels of defense (this was the time before we had to dark arts every weapon skill). Dark Knight was heads and shoulders above paladin in magical fights, which was most of heavensward, and did fine in physical fights thanks to things like reprisal dark dance and other cooldowns.

Healers and parties sure didn't seem to mind having to 'adjust' without plds in the past.

Yes, because when you put it in context of the skills dark knight and warrior brought, you realize that healers didn't mind adjusting because the adjusting meant healing less and getting more damage from your tanks. The two tanks bringing the most damage also brought the best utilities. Like now only the names have changed.

If Drk/war did significantly more damage than Pld/X they would again. Utility has a non-zero benefit obviously, but it pales in comparison to DPS when defining the meta in this game. The meta will drop utility like a hot potato if they can grab more damage in its place. This has born out in history for both DPS, healers and tanks. Utility always takes a backseat based on this games setup. It is not of zero value, but it is, unarguably, much less value than DPS.

Except that it doesn't, your appeal to "reality" here isn't backed up. There are several reasons why:

(1) We haven't had a time when tank dps and defensive utilities were balanced against eachother: I.e. Higher damage means lower utilities and higher utilities means lower damage.

(2) This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities.

(3) This isn't true for healers where astro is within the meta despite being the weakest damaging healer by a significant margin compared to white mage.

Utility wins, every single class in the meta brings a utility (either direct damage or defense utilities: read healer dps utilities). While it is very nice that you agree that dark knight is probably the weakest of the three, I find it disingenuous that you sit here telling people how much they should be complaining or how loudly they should complain while posting context free (and therefore misleading) factoids that don't represent the actual situation at the time. I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.