Let's say we'd get more skills - How would you handle them?

[Shurrikhan]

That's what I'm waiting to see how they do. Instead of Shadowskin, Foresight and Rampart. Condense them all down to one and adjust the traits to make it work out better. So for that example you push them all into one skill and add traits as you go along. One to reduce the cooldown time, another to lengthen the duration and another to increase the damage -%.

That would only save you one button, while reducing the level of control a given tank has over their incoming damage. I would certainly hope the skills aren't there just to make sure you can passively ("umm, tanky button?") get through whatever situation is designed for us. The numbers can be tuned at will, the only difference then being the amount of passive strength they wish to put into tanks vs. other roles. Your Foresight/Rampart/Shadowskin (of which you can only have two in the first place) doesn't need to be 30 seconds long while mitigating a quarter of all incoming damage. The only reason to do empower the mitigation toolkit is to underpower non-tank survivability, and the only reason to passively ball them up into one when they've had distinct places before is to ensure that a tank experiences periods of weakness (no CD coverage — e.g. not even Foresight/Awareness) by forcing those capabilities to be stacked. Particular boss timings aside, it's no different than taking your Sentinel away in exchange for an excessively empowered Rampart, or your Rampart taken away for a slightly shorter Sentinel CD which falls nonetheless short of meeting the timings you want.

Or go into something that's more comfortable for me. White Mage. We don't need Stone I , II , III unless they do something drastic and majorly different. Make them one skill and then a trait will enhance it and change the icon / damage. Repose, never used that after so long. Fluid Aura..make Aero I / II / II like Stone but all aoe and give us Tornado as white mage.

While I'll agree about Stone II and III, Stone I and II / III are as different as Stella and Malefic. It's your heavy, which merely happens to double as filler damage until Stone II.

What's so hard is that we don't really have much to do in combat besides deal as much damage as possible, so it's difficult to put other things in there. So a lot of things they could put in they can't, buffs don't last that long...maybe that's an issue that needs to be resolved. Instead of chaining in some abilities that do the same thing about, why not increase the duration..cut back on some of the needed buffs and boost that duration.

Increasing the duration of buffs would mean that you spend even more time doing nothing but spamming (filler) damage keys. At present, with very few exceptions (Fracture and ToD) every ability that is weak in the short term is proportionately stronger, if maximized, in the long term. Those buffs are already your strongest damage abilities, but the fact that they're not overwhelming long or powerful does at least allow you the occasional reason to forgo them.

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You could probably redo those triads of each element to be stackable, Magicka-esque elemental modifiers that provide satisfying player control in each situation, variable to each situation, but as long as we're just talking basic SE abilities here, all but Stone II are still as distinct as any other attack arsenal. That may be leaving the bar low, but your alternative would leave it lower still (short a Heavy for WHMs, or spending extra mana to deplete heavy DRs needlessly, etc.).