On your first question, "Back in the day" must have been later in the EQ lifetime. Even through Velious, raid content was "warrior or GTFO". Defensive discipline, which was exclusive to warriors, is an insurmountable advantage for warriors. Also, warriors are coded to have better HP scaling, their armor has higher innate AC (see Cobalt vs. Deepwater BPs), and I'm sure there are a few other innate benefits that tanks can elaborate on. I don't think it was until guilds were farming PoTime that they started letting knights MT for their increased aggro generation on farm content.

Velious also had a large end-game Giant population, which, if I remember correctly, is immune to stun regardless of level. So even if camps are fighting mobs under the 55th level, their pally tank could still be fighting stun-immune mobs.

The cool thing about blind, also, is that currently every 20 mobs or so the blind will just make the mob flip out and run all over the place, so enchanters have heart attacks :)

Definitely remember having a SK MTing Ssra during Luclin era (which we won't see ont his server) and that was pre VT as we didn't enter VT until after PoP release.
I'll be honest by saying I'm not 100% sure before that but a good 75% that this same SK has been occasionnaly MTing during Velious (with a few exceptions such as the AoW).

That's not an experience I ever had, but then again I was never end-game hardcore. It's awesome to hear about a knight tanking pre-PoP farming though! Was he MTing progression or only content that was on farm?

Both, he was our 2nd MT, covering for our MT warrior when said warrior couldn't make it to raid or when he died early. To this day I still don't understand why he wasn't our 1st MT (aside for some very specific targets), that lizard was just pure sexy awesomeness when it came to taking a beating or the others.

We had paladins/sk tank encounters in TOV and prior to that in Kunark many times with success. I remember TOV a bit more clearly. :) And before its said this was during the expac's not after the later ones came out but during each one.

It all depends on the encounter. Snap agro from a knight is needed often in raid encounters. And as far as groups are concerned a Pal/Sk outshine a warrior in most cases as they are more versatile.

So it was NOT warrior or GTFO. LMAO Class hate and the illusion of "perfect" groups are ruling here too much. Have some flexibility and have some fun.

People understand the game better and there seem to be better players (on average) than back in the day. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw knights tanking with more success this time around.

Raiding happened before Disc's and Kunark class armor. Warriors in classic were the worst of the 3 options for most raid tanking.

Ok, I've taken enough hate here. I apologize for forwarding the belief that it was "warrior or GTFO". I still stand by the inherent advantages to mitigation that warriors held over knights for a long time. However, as many above me have pointed out, skilled play (and more clerics) can surmount mitigation, but threat generation is a harder skill for warriors to catch up with knights on.

Hehe. Don't ya love that.