Tank stance was never a skill check. It just separated out tanks into players who were 'in the know' from people who weren't. The latter category progressively shrunk over the course of ARR to Stormblood as the issues around tank stance and tank gearing became basic knowledge in raiding. The term "stance dancing" is a complete misnomer.

Enmity is a proxy for actually doing damage. Do you know what's less exciting than just doing damage? Just doing fictional damage. No, the enmity and stance changes were incredibly good changes for the role.

But by cutting out the fluff, we've also exposed the underlying problems.

Positioning is my biggest gripe at the moment. This has never really been FFXIV's strongest suit. But by Stormblood the fight designers had became so enamoured with their own fight choreography that they just took player agency out of it with auto-positioning bosses. This might be my rose-tinted glasses, but this is one area of fight design that Warcraft devs seem to (at least historically) have understood better.

Raiding is filled with all-or-nothing checks. During progression, a single mechanics error from a single party member is (theoretically) supposed to trigger a wipe. If dps players can cause a wipe by not moving their icons to the correct places at the correct times, surely we can trust our tanks with genuinely threatening mitigation checks? It seems like most of the relevant damage in any given fight is on the raid, rather than on the tank.

It's like your tank isn't even there.

I think the concept of "carry potential" is an important factor in drawing skilled players to a role. If the work that you do doesn't carry an impact, then why invest effort to get good at it? With tanks, you have a role that is paradoxically intimidating to newer players (in dungeon content), yet leaves more experienced players with less opportunity to impact their team (in raid content).

And yet we seem surprised at tank numbers.