What if Tank classes could only meatshield?

[Alphras]

In my opinion, instead of having the tanks focus on dishing out max dps they should be focused on allowing the others to dish out max dps by mitigating as much as possible, meaning less healing required etc.

These two are not mutually exclusive. A good tank will always focus on maxmizing dps while minimizing damage taken at the same time. Finding the balance is what makes it interesting.

Personally I would find tanking more enjoyable if the goal was to focus on handling large amounts of incoming damage on an ongoing basis, mitigating it (through specific gearing and through abilities)

Well there are no real gear options (which is a problem imo), but the handling of large amounts of incoming damage is already in the game (albeit only in savage). The thing is maximizing your mitigation with cooldowns is not really a challenge for most experienced tanks and after learning a fight it is pretty much simple routine.

As I've said before, tanking outside of tank stance is unthinkable in other games between mitigation gained from the stances and enmity modifiers being tied to same.

Don't know about that. I already did that when I started with tanking in WOW 10 years ago (maybe that changed with the addons, only played vanilla) and multiple other games after that.