Hopeling

True, enhancements don't literally reduce your damage cap - it'll always turn light blue at 300% (or the appropriate number for other ATs), no matter what you slot. But if you also have 95% damage enhancement in a power, then you're at +395% damage in that power, which is then capped at 300. So slotting more damage gives you less room to benefit from buffs.

Scrappers and Brutes are pretty superfluous on a team that has a Tanker. In almost every case, the team would be better off with, say, a Corruptor instead. That's the downside. It's not a trivial one, either; just the other day I was on a UG run that failed miserably, mostly because we had way too many melee, and not enough buffs and debuffs. For another example, on the beta server a few weeks ago, I was part of an impromptu all-melee ITF (a bunch of us testing out titan weapons), and although we completed it, it was a lot bumpier than it would've been with a more normal group composition.

If protecting your team is a 'privilege' that you put in quote marks, why do you even want to play a tank?

Really, there can be a reasonable, defensible position that Tankers are getting the short end of the stick somewhere. You won't get everyone to agree with you, of course, because that's just the way opinions work. But instead you seem intent on occupying the position that "Tankers hit like girls" (combining falsehood with sexism, always a lovely combo) and that Scrappers and Brutes need to suffer for choosing an archetype that can steal thunder from the Tanker that so richly deserves it.

Right, I'm not saying scrappers/brutes are bad in general. When teamed with a tank, though, their defenses become less important.
I'm mostly asking why brutes/scrappers filling their primary team role of doing damage is described as "flouting", as if it's some kind of personal insult to the tank, while a blaster filling their primary team role of doing damage is good, expected, and deserving of the tank's protection.

Why do scrappers/brutes 'flout' their damage, while blasters are squishies deserving of protection? If anything, when I play a brute or scrapper and team with a tank, I feel kinda penalized - most of my secondary isn't doing much and I might as well play a blaster, or better yet something with buffs or debuffs.

If you're going to pick nits, you should note that he wrote a + sign. 400% damage is +300%, and 500% damage is +400%. As evidenced in-game by the damage bonus stat in combat attributes turning light blue when it reaches 300%.

Over the lifetime of this game, I've probably spent more time earning, buying, and crafting IOs than I have working on Incarnate powers. Yet nobody ever tells me my character concepts should include being an inventor and a savvy marketeer, or that I should incorporate a connection to Positron when I equip his Blast, or similarly silly things.

The lore behind Incarnate powers has been rather more intrusive, but there's no compelling reason it must always be so. Why can't my Incarnate powers grant me greater influence among my allies, to call on them at need? Or the power to command my enemies? Why do I have to summon ghosts? Leave in the ghostly aura as an option, the default option even. It fits some characters perfectly. It would be nice to also have the option for corporeal Lore summons.

I'm not at all convinced that's true.

If we have a brute with 95% damage enhancement in attacks, and 70 fury (+140%), and unstacked Rage (+80%), he's running around with +315% damage, or 415% total. 10 seconds out of 120 are spent in a crash, basically doing no damage. If we take a weighted average over those 120 seconds, (110*415 + 10*0)/120 = 380% damage averaged over time.
If he double-stacks Rage, casting it exactly every 60 seconds, he'll be at 495% damage, but have twice as many crashes. The weighted average here is (100*495 + 20*0)/120 = 412% damage averaged over time.

But you don't actually do zero damage during rage crashes - Judgement still works fine, as do Interface DoTs. You can also use the time to combine/manage your insps, use clicky defenses, etc that would eat into your dps anyway. So Rage crashes actually cost less DPS than the above analysis suggests, putting double Rage even further ahead.

The annoyance factor of frequent Rage crashes is another matter, as is the endurance drain. But for straight DPS, double Rage appears to be advantageous. I might be missing something, please correct me if so.

Somebody already did - Arcanaville, on the previous page. I don't know how much you frequent the forums, so you might not know who she is, but Arcanaville is probably the single most knowledgeable player around. When Arcanaville says something will be really hard to do and probably end up broken anyway, it's a safe bet that she is right.

Good question! People seem to do it all the time, so there must be some reason. I can't speak for everyone who plays a tank, but personally I do so because I find that Scrappers and Brutes are NOT as survivable as tanks, nor as capable of handling aggro for a team, in a great many situations, with or without IOs.

CoT ghosts wouldn't fit with their powers, which are fire and ice blasts and Empathy heals. A separate tree for actual ghosts CoT-style, rather than Phantom Army ghosts, would be cool though.

The fact that they considered it, designed it, then didn't implement it after all is a strong indicator to me that, having analyzed it in detail, they decided it wasn't actually a good change to make.
I'm not at all convinced of this point. Using more endurance to defeat enemies is a side effect of using more attacks to defeat them, which is a direct result of doing less damage. Defenders use more endurance than Blasters to defeat enemies, too, but I've never seen that made out as an AT balance problem.
Of course, there's a question of degree - if a tank is sucking wind halfway through a fight with a single minion, that's a big problem - but just using more end at all isn't automatically a balance problem.

All that said, I pretty much agree with the main thrust of Johnny Butane's first post in this thread:
However, rather than let Tankers sacrifice less damage for a survivability edge that still doesn't come into play all that often ("We're less outclassed by brutes than we used to be!"), I would rather somehow allow that edge to come into play more often. A higher aggro cap, or some way to absorb damage for teammates, for example, would be cool solutions, and would set them apart from Brutes.

That's not how it works either, at least from what I've seen. You might need several Clarions, but you don't need EVERYONE to have it. And although a whole league won't usually say "oops, no clarion, let's run something else to earn it", individual players certainly do. I can say this with certainty because I am one such player - after a miserable failure at the Avatar on my first UG run, I began gathering parts for a Clarion from the other trials before I ran UG again, and the next time I saw the Avatar, destroyed him without ever being Confused. I don't claim sole credit for that defeat, but my Clarion certainly helped, as did the Clarions of several other players who probably also built them specifically for the trial.

...and EVERY TIME that this happens, they seem surprised by it.

I don't have much constructive to add here, so I'll just...
Post.
Agree.
Rularuu.

Even many non-melee builds still take the Fighting pool. Melee are pretty much expected to get shot at by lots of dudes, so they usually take Fighting. Other types of builds aren't universally expected to be able to do that, but the ones that want to often use Fighting as well, especially in the world of Inherent Fitness.

If it were widespread enough, you could make an argument similar to Fitness that base survivability should be adjusted and Fighting go away (or just make the whole thing inherent), but I don't think Fighting is nearly as mandatory as Fitness ever was. Even if it's unquestionably the best pool, you can still make a functioning character without it.

There's plenty more to the game than playing marketeer and maximizing the rewards from your play time. For example, you can fight supervillains, or even BE a supervillain. ;P

Edit: And I say this as someone who enjoys marketeering and maximizing rewards.

The trials that aren't built around having certain (or any) incarnate powers, presumably. BAF, Lambda, and now Keyes are perfectly accessible to a fresh 50.

The devs do seem to expect us to build different abilities as needed - Destiny in particular. Clarion is great for UG, but Rebirth is nice in Keyes (it's less important now that the pulses are so much weaker, but still nice to be able to help disintegrating teammates and such). I wouldn't be surprised if some future trial has large, predictable bursts of damage that can be mitigated with Barrier, or mass endurance drain to favor Ageless.

You might have to define what exactly you mean by "role" before this statement makes sense. If you're talking about the traditional MMO tank role, which is to hold aggro and survive, in a game that plays fast and loose with group role, I don't think it's reasonable to say that only one archetype in 14 should fill that role. So in that sense, Brutes and Tankers absolutely do and should share a role. If you mean something else, can you clarify?