Gmee, I think I see what you are getting at. I think your problem is less with the "pencil neck number number cruncher" and more with the folks who blindly read the things they read on sites like this. "Adam says stam is the most important, and you gemed for defense, so you are stupid." That kind of thinking shows they have no idea what they are talking about (perhaps you gemmed for defense to hit 415 until you could close the gap in another way, and then you were planning on going back to stam). They have no idea what to do outside of following a cookie-cutter pattern. They are actually much less likely to be number crunchers.

The reality of tanking is that our gearing needs vary from fight to fight, and good tanks will know how to evaluate the trade offs of using different sorts of gear. Bad tanks wear the same thing all the time, and just stack stam because "it works." Something that works 90% of the time is nice, but not great. I have a prot paladin that has gear for stam, and gear for avoidance. I max-min depending on the content I'm facing, and I just can't get over how other tanks try to get by without doing this.

For example, in ZA on the bear and the lynx, of the three tanking classes I should be taking the most damage. Druid tanks should shine here because these bosses can't crush. I've run it with several druid OTs, and I often get comments from healers about how much easier it is to keep me alive on these encounters. How could this be? I took a peek at a few of these druids, and low and behold they had geared only for 415 defense and stam. One guy had more than 18k health (buffed), but only 24% dodge... Even when I'm just stacking stam I have that much dodge on my paladin. He shouldn't have been in ZA, pure and simple. Someone told him he needed 18k health to do it, and he'd be good to go. This is the kind of thinking that I think you have a problem with.

There is no right answer to gear, and you have to actually do a little thinking to get the job done. Do you have to crunch numbers? Not necessarily, but you do have to pay attention to your surroundings and have a rough idea of which stats you need in which encounters. If you don't then you are pushing that responsibility off on your healers, and if you never wipe then I guess there is nothing wrong with it.