Wall of text from guy with lots of time invested on SK:
Group content was where knights shined, but EQ never really placed much of an emphasis on that. You can point to the prenerf Ikkinz Trials or MPG Trials, but those weren't exactly stonewalling (pun intended) warriors.
From a raiding perspective, knights were shit from Luclin to when I quit for the first time in OoW. Every so often there would be a mob that would AE fear (i.e Innoruuk/CT) where a knight with fearless could be an option, but it was still probably better to just use a warrior.
Even if a knight outgeared the content, they're were pretty trash relative to a warrior. It's a similar situation to Clerics and Druids, but the issue is that additional healing stacked whereas tanking did not. A Vex-Thal geared warrior is going to be a far better tank for a highend raid mob than a PoTime geared Knight due to having evasive/defensive.
And despite knights having amazing threat generation, they lacked an ability like AE-taunt that would 100% put them on top of the aggro list for surefire tank switches.
Knights also lacked an ability for burst damage avoidance for when they did manage to get aggro. Even rangers had this in weapon-shield. This is pretty vital for establishing a CH chain or slowing/debuffing a target.
Anyhow, in terms of additional roles:
SKs (imo) were the worst class in the game from a raiding perspective. IMO, they shared a spot with bards for the best pulling class in the game until they made monks even more idiot proof in GoD. SKs received a single target aggro buff and a hate line of spells that basically didn't work until OoW. They could generate a small amount of group mana with Zev Bite in PoP and a moderate amount with the addition of a separate cooldown Ancient Bite in GoD. They also had a decent group ATK buff. Generally the classes that wanted mana didn't want ATK and visa versa. While their threat generation was still good, it didn't really become great until OoW fixed the terror line. SKs spam clinging darkness from the DC/SV nerfs until the OoW terror line.
Paladins just offered so much more than SKs outside of pulling.
Paladins became arguably the best rampage tank given DA hammer (as long as they weren't an idiot with it since it blocks heals too). Decent group healing and single-target spot healing. Still maintained the Brells role. Paladins generally had higher HP since their self-buff (Aura of the Crusader) stacked with Aegolism line whereas SK's self-buff (Cloak of Shadows) did not stack with Aegolism or Symbol+Druid until much later.
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