How do we feel about tank damage right now?

[Reynhart]

Sure. I, who have had dedicated tank character and another a multi-role character that has nonetheless ended up tanking half the time, am biased against tanks in favor of dps.

The description you gave is. Especially since, again, everybody does damage, everybody does mechanics and positions. So, that "everything else" you gave to the DPS is basically nothing that tanks and healers already partly do...while the opposite is almost or completely false depending on the DPS you pick. (For example, BLM doesn't heal...at all, and barely mitigates)

You will never remove dps so long as fights are completed through reducing the enemy's HP to 0.

Again, holy Trinity, not removing any role, etc, etc...but still, healers and tanks have far more implication in DPS than DPS have in mitigation, enmity management and healing.

You (1) berated those who felt that the difference in output based on optimization felt lacking as obsessed dps-wannabes

No, I talked about people quitting tanking if they weren't able to do damage.

(2)insisted that dps shouldn't be the metric by which tanks are judged

No, only that DPS' DPS (Damn, it was so much easier when they were nicknamed "DD") shouldn't be the metric by which tank's skill are judged. Exactly like RDM's skill shouldn't be judged in regards to BLM's damage output.

(3) insisted that no matter how the relative reward compares to the effort achievable on another role (as seen any time a more skilled player swaps off tank to a dps and lets a less skilled player replace him to greater net effect in the party, making it eventually optimal that, for the best possible impact, one "outgrows" tanks) one should only ever care about their percentile for their own role. So what else am I supposed to think?

Yes, because before everything else, you should play the role you want to play. I'll never let anyone force me to play a DPS "because it's more optimal" if I want to play my tank or vice-versa.

such would increasingly scale the difference between good and bad tanking (as, again, there's nothing else at present to meaningfully differentiate tanks)

Last time I checked FFlogs to see DRK's DPS on E1S, it varied from 6k to 9k depending on percentile. That's 50% more, do we really need a larger scale to differentiate tank skill ?

and we're not likely to see tanking differentiated by anything more than damage dealt until next expansion

Considering that damage and mechanics are different in each encounter, we don't know how much "tanking" will be challenging in later Shadowbringers. As for actual job adjustments, if they want enmity to be back, they'd just need to reduce the enmity boost on tank stance, so that tanks would still need to perform a proper rotation or DPS will rip the target off them. (A x2 enmity could give some really fun results...)

I'll agree with you on the first two points, but the moment a tank, as you've implied, can rightly be satisfied with their "impact" just for being present and hitting a couple keys on their respective queues, is the point where I'd have to give up tanking for good.

Again, IIRC, FFlogs shows a variation of around 50% for DRK's DPS. That's already a lot of room to improve yourself. What I've implied in my absurd scenario is that tanks will always contribute meaningfully.