Out of curiosity, could you point out such "contradictory" claims? I haven't seen one in this forum thread yet.
Retail was live, whereas now we've had a decade of theorycrafting to figure out what works best and what doesn't. Why would you assume they were correct and we are wrong? And why do you think we would care if they laughed at us? I'd rather we examined the arguments individually, rather than assume Retail is gospell and modernity is wrong.
I don't think anyone argues Prot warrs cannot tank anything. Rather the point is that they are worse tanks than the other 3, for a few reasons.
Champion amongst these is the inferior EHP (bears have massive hp, DK and Paladins get 15% more than warrs). Is that a "nice to have" only? Is it of no significance?
I suppose it depends on how you would define it.
Would you accept, instead of a proper holy paladin, a ret who uses holy gear with a ret spec? Couldn't the entire holy spec tree be considered a mere "nice to have" for a healer and by no means a necessary feature for healing?
If you have an objective criteria to separate "nice to have" and "need to have", I'd love to hear it.
I'll be honnest, I've never been in a serious raiding guild that doesn't **** on prot warrs constantly and prefers to take paladins or w/e instead. But maybe that's just me. And a lot of these guilds cleared LoD/Rs hc regularly, which surely must be enough for us to take them seriously, wouldn't you agree?