Since we're comparing tanking to other MMOs I'd say originally tanking was more akin to FFXI than any other MMO, though, in a much more dumbed down and easy way. And before anyone makes any uniformed comments about the success of FFXI it is still going strong and even paid for the remake of FFXIV. FFXI had a great balance with difficulty that really made you feel like you'd achieved things in the fight, and while certain hard fights were timed most weren't and there was almost no DPS checks with insta-wipe. Also mobs weren't overly scripted to a set rotation of abilities. The fact there was always a chance of losing because you could rarely predict exactly what curve balls may be thrown your way was exciting, there was a lot more adapting to situations as they developed rather than memorising sequences. In that hate management was a huge part of the game, to the extent that there were two forms of enmity known as Volatile and Cumulative. Volatile enmity is high impact but fast decay while cumulative decays slowly. All damage caused volatile enmity spikes, and abilities like provoke were high in volatile enmity while flash was better for building cumulative enmity. Tanks had to keep their cumulative enmity and account for volatile enmity, especially from spike damage classes like BLM or SAM.

EVERYTHING effected hate, damage got you hate, taking damage made you lose it, so tanks had to constantly maintain their enmity and it was a very satisfying experience. Constant high damage wasn't needed from tanks. The enmity system was such that it even allowed for different forms of tanking that the game developers never even counted on in the form of "blink" tanking. Ninja, the primary blink tank (though for a while RDM tanks were a thing during for certain high level battle in Aht Urhgan). Ninja was meant to be a DD and had very few hate tools in the beginning (though the devs embraced its tanking role and it gained more enmity tools later on, but also enmity mitigation so they could be used as DD also). They relied on hasted auto attack, provoke (from war sub job) and weaponskills to maintain enmity. The reason blink tanking worked was because their spell that put up shadows meant that when the enemy hit them they consumed a shadow instead of causing damage and thus they didn't lose enmity for taking damage. Shadow management in and of itself was an art form because of long recast times, the fact the lower level spell couldn't overwrite the remaining shadows of the higher level one (so you had to time your recast as the last shadow dropped because nin took a lot of damage if hit) and avoid getting interrupted when you got hit. The variety in how the different tanks worked made having multiple tanking jobs fun. But now on to my main point. Nobody complained they had to manage enmity.