I'm generally in the middle here, I like a medium pull (especially on WHM) but when they get past 2 packs many DF tanks need a pretty constant heal spam to not be floortanking in seconds.

That being said I just did Xephatol as AST with a BRD, MCH and the best PLD I have ever seen. He did every pull as large as possible amd even with that I was spamming Gravity and melting everything like I was a DPS. My Aspected Benefic shields were lasting crazy lengths of time. It got to a point that he would just throw a Clemency on himself every once in a while and I just killed things.

On bosses he was the perfect Sword Oath PLD, I am on PS4 so I can't run a parser but from what I could tell he was doing good damage.

Just so stress free, so unlike what I expected when he first pulled all the way up the hill

Point is? Some tanks can handle it. Sadly more tanks just think they can handle it.