Limited AOE? Um, really? Were you playing the same bear as I was, where all I had to do was bind Maul to Swipe and get RSI by mashing that one macro? :P Bears were miles ahead on AOE threat for quite a while now. In fact, in vanilla Swipe was an absolute monster, you literally had only to Swipe once and the mobs were simply glued to you. That's how high the threat coefficient was. Of course, it was balanced because everyone said "lol bear, get in the back and heal me nub." Once bears were viable tanks it was promptly changed.

I do agree though, I sometimes miss the feel of bears in TBC which made me fall in love with the class. The whole "I have huge armor and hitpoints, I'm a big furry waddling meat shield, come try me!" attitude. It was awesome, it was unique, it was fun. I didn't like the fact that we were so reliant on our healers, though, as we had no real cooldowns to speak of. Surv Instincts didn't exist, Frenzied Regen restored a flat and laughable amount of HP, and Barkskin wasn't castable in forms. I had a permanently clenched face while tanking difficult fights, watching my health yo-yo like crazy and knowing there was nothing I could do about it.

Ah well. Being a bear does still feel different from my warrior, and each of those feels different still from my paladin. The differences are just getting less and less with each passing expansion, and I wonder how far they can go before the only difference between say, a DK and a warrior is the DK has glowy blue eyes and different spell names.