Why are people taking this as "either.. or"?

No one is advocating having so much STR at the cost of enough survivability. People talk as if the "enough to survive tank buster" is literally "tank buster + 1hp". Which is ridiculous.

You can have enough HP to survive tank busters and still have enough STR to do decent DPS. As a 14.5k HP DRK (2 slaying accessories which is a middle I'm comfortable with when playing with healers I don't know), I can solo soak blinding blade popping a CD with some extra 3k~7k HP based on RNG (lolparry). Now I'm not saying solo soak Blinding Blade because you can. I'm saying there is no content currently that forces you to have more than 14k HP.

Fluff damage doesn't warrant gearing for vitality to give your healer a break where they cast a heal all of 1 GCD earlier. Also STR speccing makes self heals (Clemency, Equilibrium, IB, SE... etc) becomes more valuable. Not having that 1.4k HP isn't what's gonna break your healer from prioritizing you over the DPS because of 1 random mistake happening. Now if you AND the DPS make mistakes at the same time, that's a whole different story.