Agreed. All of those things people miss are in themselves good examples of why they were removed. People seem to assign a lot of nostalgia to the tedium, but they also seem unable to see how things such as tank stances provided exactly 0 gameplay depth, they were just extra buttons to press in a rote manner. And rote button presses only add RSI, nothing else. It's the same with cleric stance etc.

There could be actual meaning behind these things, but it's a fickle thing. For example tanks having to actually right for aggro is a thing WoW readily explored for other MMORPGs. In all possible variants and iterations. It has upsides and downsides, the biggest downside I bet would send people into a rage here is that if you are a DPS, and you get better at your rotation and could do more damage (or say you get better gear), than means nothing. If the tank isn't doing better or getting better gear first, you can't deal any more damage. The tank's output is a cap on the total damage you can deal for a given fight duration, with no wiggle room. That can be smart design (it makes it very easy to make all DPS effectively deal the same amount of damage, balance-wise, simply making the cap low enough), but it understandably also isn't very popular as damage dealers can't actually derive much benefit from player skill.

Likewise, stance-dancing if it's a rote thing (like the tank stances or cleric stance) doesn't provide value. A good test here is whether you could bake the effects into the skills themselves at no loss of external, perceivable, function. If yes there's no reason to switch stances unless there's an external lockout mechanism (CD can work, but is usually the cop-out if you don't have another one). A positive example here is how the "stance" - it ain't one, but this at least provides an example - of Holy Sheltron works in PvP: If the shield is broken because you're taking damage you fall into a defense stance (or buff, in the current PvP iteration) while if it ain't, you can be more offensive. This uses an external factor, something you need to play smart with depending on which outcome you are after at each point in time.

Whenever I bring up in a thread how many skills could be removed at 0 loss of depth to the gameplay, this is what I mean: we have so many rote buttons to press that require 0 brain interaction to decide when and whether to use them. There is no reason to press 5 buttons in 2 seconds to achieve X potency if the same could be done with 1 button if that sequence never changes. If there's no interaction. If your entire rotation is just a glorified DoT with animations, then you provide no more value (as a whole character) than a debuff on the enemy dealing damage every 3 seconds. Huzzah. Bemoaning skills lost that were nothing but this extremely flat and rote gameplay is wild to me: They are the very example of what the game needs to shed more of. All of!.