Why make vengeance so complicated .. really.

We don't want tanks to do awesome damage just for being tanks. We want tanks to do awesome damage when they are actually tanking. That remains the governing philosophy behind the design.

Remember, Vengeance doesn't exist to give tanks something fun to do. It exists solely to make sure tank threat stays high when DPS characters are gearing for higher DPS while the tanks gear primarily for survival. Tanks only need to generate high threat when they are tanking, and typically threat is the most important on the most dangerous opponents, which also tend to be those who hit the hardest.

As an aside, if I was able to design WoW solely for me, threat would still be an important stat to gear for. Raiders would scoff at tanks who stacked only Stamina as being bad tanks because they couldn't hold aggro. It was fun for me back in BWL to try to generate higher threat than the warlocks. I don't think it was that fun for the warlocks though. I don't think it was that fun for the rest of the raid when I screwed up e.g. my Heroic Strike use and caused us to wipe without them feeling like they could do anything to resolve the situation except stop DPS. Fortunately, I recognize that WoW would have far fewer players if I got to design it totally around what I find fun. :)

It would be nice if your successful Taunt granted some Vengeance.

We're toying with that idea. It would be a percent of Vengeance of the character you taunted off of, not just free AP.

The scenario we want to avoid is Tank A is tanking, and Tank B taunts off, but then avoids three boss hits in a row. The boss is likely to go back to Tank A. The avoidance wouldn't be a problem if it came later on, because we average things out, but if it happens early on, we have nothing to average.

You could have solved that if you just gave everyone threat drops. Why would that have been such a problem? Even now I run into bad thanks that can't hold threat off my Warrior or DK, and I have to sit there doing nothing because one special attack will rip threat.

I don't think that really solves the problem. If dumping your cooldown regularly was necessary then it would almost become part of your DPS rotation which doesn't seem like it's adding much gameplay. If dumping your cooldown was something you only did when the boss turned to attack you, then it would still be really sub-optimal to have the boss always bolting around, cleaving, breathing or whatever else to the group. I think you'd still just want to keep the boss on the tank and have the raid do slow DPS.

And lastly, Threat being fun back in Vanilla (and it was) was only possible because the dungeons required you to understand and react to it.

I'm not sure it was fun in vanilla. It was fun for me because I was a tank. I see mostly tanks say it was fun. I haven't seen too many DPS players say it was fun to try not to do so much DPS that they caught up with the tank.

I know "scaling" is the fall guy for just about anything, and it's the most over (and wrongly) used word on the forums...

Totally agree with that. The rest of your post was good too, but I believe we have fixed the differing mitigation problem.

I think I started writing a reply to the Vengeance topic earlier, but I deleted it. Just didn't seem like my voice would matter, because I'm fairly sure I come down on the opposite side of Blizz in regard to the topic of Tank damage. My feeling is low Tank damage is one of the contributing factors to the insufficient Tank supply and that many Tanks would enjoy doing much higher damage.

"Every voice matters." I disagree with you a little about tank shortage. I think it is almost entirely because tanks have a lot of responsibility to set the pace of things, know the boss mechanics and often even have to explain them to others.

This game has spectacular framework and is bar none the best game I have played, however sometimes I feel like you really don't understand what we find fun.

A little off topic, but I would argue that perhaps you don't realize that some players find fun things that you don't find fun.

1) Tanks need a way to scale up their threat output as DPS gear up into threat stats only while tanks take primarily defensive stats (even in this new active mitigation model it seems).

2) The current versions of vengence on both live and beta have similar problems and quirks that make it "not fun" to quest in a tank spec, or to have to deal with tank swaps.

One hundred percent agree that point 1 is important. That was the genesis of Vengeance. We don't think tanks need high damage in order for questing to be fun, and you can even argue that it's not important for tanks to be good at questing. (I'm not arguing that specifically, but I don't think it's a hard argument to make.)