I still remember the time, that loot was primarily given to the main tank, as well as “selling Items” to pay for his repairs.
This did not happen out of courtesy but rather out of the fact that your tanks gear defined your progress.
Of course you could not advance further if your Raid lacked DPS or Healing, but this lack did not become as obvious,
as seeing your tank dying after the first attacks.

Another point was, that your tanks abilities, determined your DPS by large margins. Althoug we had taunts, losing Aggro was usually a desaster.
Remember the typical “Hunter Aggro” Wipe. A poor hunter drawed the attention of the fierce Dragon towards him. Which in those days ment, 130% of the tanks Aggro. So our unfortunate hunter became the “tank”. Which means, everybody in his surrounding was allowed to have 100% Aggro. Usually the hunter feigned death at this point, passing the “tank role” to another ranged class next to him, which lost its 130% Aggro Ranged privilege thanks to the hunter.

This usually ended in Bosses slaughtering the Ranged Classes and especially healers.

I started tanking in Classic, which might be confusing out of the fact that I play a Paladin, who did not have a taunt at that time. As you might imagine, times where pretty rough for me, on the other hand I was stubborn enough to refuse taking another role. At the end, I found my niche in fast, Aggro build up and AE intensive Fights.

Later in BC Tanks main concern was surviving. If you timed your Survival abilities wrong the fight was over. Remember how crucial it was to avoid getting stunned, or how invaluable your shield was to avoid crushing blows. At that time, Aggro-Meter made the Aggro mechanism trivial, but it was still a challenge to find a balance between Aggro generating abilities and survival abilities.

One short story is very characterisiq in my eyes for the situation right now.

We had severe issues with our Internet Connection, which very often threw me out of the game. The ones were your screen freezes for a Minute. In two cases we were even able to win the fight, just because my auto attacks, and the hunter and rogues routine were enough to keep me on top.
Another Time, I was able to tank Lady Deathwisper with 5 Stacks, through Phase 2 after my fellow Tank died.
Both situations were not depending on my actual abilities.

All in all, I have not found one challenging fight so far in Wrath of the Lich King. The only challenge I have at the moment is keeping my fellow tank alive in his tank phase.

One must value the steps of Blizzard taken, to encourage more players to tank. Unfortunately the measures taken, went into the wrong direction.
Explaining this, would bring us away from the topic. As always, things are connected in a such complex way, that you can not point on a single problem, without considering the rest.

However, I question, as you did, the original argument. There’s only so many ways in which you can give 3 tanks meanginful jobs to do in a boss fight. When you go to the effort of honing tanking gear and skills, the last thing you want to do is spend half the time as sub-par DPS because you have low priority on non-tanking drops.

While we may have seen rather a lot of variations on the “Debuff #3 landed, Taunt please”, theme, I’m not sure that’s any less interesting than the Golemagg model, where there were a couple of invulnerable mobs that would never be DPSed to keep tanks busy. It would be great to have some tremendously complex boss and adds fight where the three tanks had to keep 3 mobs interweaving in a celtic cross and switching targets every 15s – but I just shudder at the thought of repeating a boss like that often.

Definitely happy here with the trend that ICC has more bosses that involve all the tanks. Although if there’s another boss that makes me stop using half of my attacks every time it’s my turn to tank, I’ll be less happy!

Also, we haven’t seen a fight which really involved manipulating threat this expansion. For example, a threat knockback fight like Broodlord Lashlayer in Blackwing Lair

“OK boys, you see that dragon over there? I need you to move it to the other side of the room and spin it around a bit, ya got that?”
“Sure thing boss, you want it next to that rock there or by the lava?”
“By the lava, oh, and if it breathes at you, just hop in for a bit”
“We approved for overtime for this?”