What do you guys think is the cause of severe lack of Tank users?

[Lyth]

There hasn't been a point in this game's history where there hasn't bee a 60+ page thread with its own version of the [Unfair Accessory Thread].

Tanks have never been satisfied.

Tank accessories and stat progression were only ever an issue when the devs started deliberately messing with them. Again, everything is relative. If the standard was set in ARR that tanking is about taking turns sitting in front of an auto-positioning boss while passively soaking damage, then players wouldn't be upset when subsequent expansions provided more of the same. And hey, if it's continuously being flagged as an issue, then maybe let's not ignore it?

And "at the very least", the cost of nipping at their heels is the loss of complete and utter safety.

If you feel completely and utterly safe as a tank, then the fight designers aren't doing their job. Maybe fix both problems, instead of using one failure to justify the other?

Your perception. Careful about those generalizations.

Mine has always been its relative place to the kit, because that's what drives the gameplay.

That's not a generalisation. It's pretty much a fundamental tenet of human nature that people are going to look over draw comparisons from what the next person is doing. But if you feel that it helps your argument to claim that you're a special case, feel free.