How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Reynhart]

Yet there's no alternate reward equivalent to the powerful heals that healers have to keep the party alive.

If there was an equivalent reward, it shouldn't take the shape of more damage but more optimized mitigation. Which is probably the reason why some people said that, to be more, engaging "tanks don't simply need +1k DPS". SE should make "actual tanking" more engaging.

The reward for healing is getting to use your active and powerful heals to keep the party alive and doing damage as best you can.

One more time "as best as you can" shouldn't be compared to "as best as DPS can" but "as best as other tanks can". That's why I said that raw numbers don't matter much as ceiling within your role.

The tanks primary function is to control the encounter. By succeeding at their primary function, -the party lives-. By excelling at their primary functions, -they enable the party-. While responsibilities have been minimized (Again- I blame threads like these), to completely leave them out and say "tanking is just hitting a mitigation button" is disingenuous at best.

A long time ago, I suggested than enmity should be a thing you had to manage. Basically, I imagined two situations.
1) The DPS should do waaaaaay more damage, but woud have to hold back their full potential if the tank wasn't able to build enough aggro, or they'd risk being targeted.
2) High enmity shoud put a debuff of the target so that it would take more damage from your party members. I called it 'Tunnel vision' and explained it as the monster being so focused on you, it has a higher chance of taking critical/direct hits from other party members. And the wider the gap in enmity, the higher the effect of tunnel vision.

But now that enmity is basically gone, there could be something tied to "optimal" mitigation. You could "build" something based on the damage you negated/reduced that could either be used to enhance your DPS (But it wouldn't be a flat potency increase) or, again, make the target more vulnerable to your party members.

On a sidenote, one thing that separates Healer from Tanks is that healers both use GCD to heals and do damage (Even if they have several oGCD). Thus, they have to judge which GCD to put where. There are no mitigation skill on GCD, so you all your GCD are aimed at doing damage. Maybe that could be changed, like Block/Parry not being a passive skill but a GCD.