We Started With Just A Notion

Count the fingers on one hand....
5, at least I hope!

5 years ago if you said "Paladins are going to tank." You'd get laughed at and flamed right out of whatever chat channel, or forum you were in.

Bump ahead to BC. If you said "Paladins are going to work equally effective as Warriors as Maintanks." You'd get flamed into the dirt so bad.

Notice I didn't put the word "Druid" in there anywhere, that's because in PreBC and BC the Paladin was nearly always compared to the Warrior. To this day even, the Warrior is the measuring stick. The "You have to be this tall to get on the ride." albeit less pronounced. The Warrior has and will always be the standard of tanking performance and what toolsets are necessary to be successful.

Many people in Lich King aren't the people that were tanking on a Paladin through BC or maybe even PreBC. A good portion leveled one in this expansion and took up tanking. Others may have been the token Holy Pally with a Protection set of gear in their bags to pick up add waves in Hyjal, or Murlocs etc in SSC.
Some people were merely offtanks relegated to eating a cleave where damage is spread among the people it hit, or there for a needed aggro swap.

I have always been someone, starting from day 1 when I decided on prot Pre Bc, that I was going to make Main Tanking work for me. Find a way to do it, and provide some facts that I wasn't a hazard to the raid group, and just as good as my Warrior comrades.
I was the first to be a paladin that Main Tanked many bosses on my server. A champion in the early days of BC that a Paladin was a great choice for Prince in Karazhan. "We don't get screwed over in second phase, no crushing blows!"
Showing how easy Leotheras was with someone like me, a simple Avengers Shield meant he'd come right back to me the instant he was done in Whirlwind, and within Hammer Of Wrath range, you couldn't pry him from me even if you had all the buffs and elixers in the world.
Bubbling on Mag fights during cave in, we took no damage, no shield wall required.
Can't tank Gruul cause of the damage, and because of the silence? Watch me..
Reliquary of souls phase where your resources caused you damage? Easy fight, just spam righteous fury and you took little damage.

And so on through the rest of the raid dungeons.

At any rate, what I was trying to get at is... I like many other passionate tanks, spent my time trying to prove my spec. Trying to show the wow world "yes I can." There was a real hatred from the start towards Protection Paladins. Did it lessen? Sure but there were still masses of people that didn't take you seriously, and many more that certainly didn't think you were a capable Main Tank.

But now as I've been reflecting on how WOTLK has gone and its impact on me and the rest of the Protection Paladin community, I'm pretty much amazed, and pleased. There's a great many of Pallies that are still barking at blues that we need "this" or "that". I only wonder if they knew how it was back then, compared to then and now, I realistically have no complaints.
Vegeance was always a touchy thing in the back of your mind, "If this stack falls off..." or how about no shield wall! No shield slam ability, a cast time on Avengers Shield. Eating through water like it was a job in heroics if you weren't chain pulling.
I see things like Hammer and our Shield Slam and I think "If we had this back when..."
We've came far, very very far from where we started, no doubtedly we've become the tanks we are today, because of diligence and hard work poured into making things work, a great core of people that told the Blues what was really up, and what we really needed. It set the course for our widespread acceptance we have now.

In some ways, we might have made it easier for Death Knights. Their abilities mirror Warrior/Paladin in spots, but in others, they're completely different and the idea of a plate wearer tanking with no shield is completely different lol. In the sense they came into the game at a time that it was alright to have more than just a warrior in the seat.
Who knows, people may have accepted them anyways.

If you had to ask me if I felt we needed more change, I'd tell you that I've seen enough of it that I could never complain again, unless they took it all away from us.