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Too true Mageman, too true. I even got booted off a team when I tried to suggest tactics or kept asking "who's leading?" which the usual response was dead silence or one time someone said "everyone". I was playing my Kheldian on Protector and constantly had to change to Dwarf to help save teammates instead of blasting in Nova. They did the exact same thing you mentioned on a pull. No one would wait around the freaking corner and the team wiped 3-4 times just at the beginning of the mission. The other tank on the team tried to make suggestions and got kicked as well. If they had a different tactic they were using before with success they sure didn't communicate it to the team.
Both I and the other tank got onto another team with someone who actually lead and had much better results.
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I think we see situations like this way too much. Part of it is the lack of pulling, and part of it is too high of a difficulty setting. When I see a L11 FF Defender in th Hollows set on Invincible, I wanna cry. A not to all: Purple Trolls are baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad!
Unearthing this a little bit, so I'll start with a brief story.
Tanking for Manticore, first mission. You'll recall it's a large lab tileset, and those sometimes have big rooms that can be bad aggro spots. So just in a few tougher spots I ask people to stay back (showing the spot) and taunt/pull/herd to a corner. Or try to. First time a scrap and a blaster jump in as soon as I get the aggro. Well, at least I have the attention, so I scold a bit after but the fight's fine.
Second time a room needs that, same instructions. This time the same blaster and a different scrapper jump in when I'm partway back (it was only about 50 feet, not a long move). More work to keep aggro, blaster dies even, and a little more scolding and I hope we got it.
Third time's the charm, and good we'd practiced because it's that one with the circular platform overhead and a medium landing, know the one? Same "stand here" instructions, I get a group and duck to the side of the door. No one ran forward, looks good. Then just as the first mob gets w/in 5 feet of the spot, the controler Fire Cages! It's hard to imagine a group more spread out. Now they're not in anyone's damage AOE, way too far for effective gauntlet control, it's just ridiculous. His reason? "You ran away from them and hid, I thought you were in trouble!"
So by that quick estimation, 50% of the population does not understand aggro and geometry management.
OK, here's the main advice I can give. Pulling is not about single pulls or group pulls or target selection or effective taunting, though those are all good reasons to do it. The point of pulling, as evidenced by the name, is making the enemy come to you. Situations will vary, but that's what a good pull always means.
Now I also advice this: if you're in a mission where you have to do careful single pulls every group just to survive - exit the mission, lower the difficulty, and reset. That's assuming you care in the slightest about xp/min or action, and most people do. As others have said, I too lack the patience for repeated single-target pulling.
However, the situation does arise. And separating one group from another, or even splitting a group in half is useful. The key is making them come to you. That's why they call it "pulling."
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Had another PUG, made of new players, in which everyone BUT the team leader was willing to listen about pulling. Everytime I was able to get one mob close to the group, the team "leader" ran up and engaged the mob before it was even close to the group. I guess he needed to show off how mighty his Controller was... with Flurry from the power pools while he didn't try to hold anything.
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I love situations like that - where I can conscientiously stand back and let someone face plant because they refuse to listen to reason or use teamwork. Tough love ftw. 
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So what do you think? Too vindictive?
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Personally, I think it's kind of extreme to deliberately aggro extra stuff to kill the team. (Though I'm sure it gets the point across. 
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Me, I simply keep one rule foremost at all times: manage your own aggro. You don't have to be a Tanker to do this. Even as a Blaster, you should always know what's attacking you at any given time, and what will attack you if you perform any given action. If your melee guys are drawing the aggro, great, you can open up on those targets. If control powers are rendering guys helpless, great, open up on them. If the enemies are debuffed to heck and gone, open up. If they're wounded and you can finish them, open up. If your tanks aren't tanking, your control guys aren't controlling, etc., but the bad guys are coming after your team, just pick one easy target and take it out without drawing aggro from anything else. Once the dork who screwed up the pull is about to die, retreat before all the loose aggro starts flying around. It's really not hard to survive even on the dumbest team. And after everyone but you wipes a few times, you'll find they'll really listen to you when you say, "Hey guys, want some advice?"
Of course, it can be a lot easier to just dump a bad team and find a better one, but I find surviving, earning respect, and educating to be pretty rewarding. 
Since I've recently started using this tactic with decent success (haven't played ATs that can pull with ranged attacks, or have generally let a blaster do the pulling), I'm not sure if this is a change of mob behavior or simply this particular faction or what.
I was duoing a mission with a scrapper friend, playing a Rad/Rad defender. We were up against groups of 3 or more orange-conning Clockwork. We weren't in "I see you" range of the clockwork, so we decided to grab the first orange alone and even the odds before I laid down RI and EF.
All I had was neutrino bolt, but they were close enough that I had the range. I zapped the first one -- like I said, I've gotten very good at this technique: you can actually fire from behind a corner if you're timing is good and you activate the power while moving. The bolt will go off and hit the target, but you're not really even in its LoS.
My scrapper friend was patiently waiting with me. Neither of us were in LoS. The bolt hits (I can see the health bar nudge down a tiny bit). And we wait. And wait. And...wait?
The little oscillator never runs toward us. I try again, and again, I'm very quick. I don't even have to step from around the corner for more than a moment to do this.
And . . . it never comes a-running. Against all sanity, I step around the corner and pause so it sees me. *Then* it comes a-running. I don't even fire a bolt!
So, my question is, what's the deal? Is this new behavior, that if an attacker is out of the LoS and doesn't see the attack coming, the mob stands there going, "Duh?" Is this typical of the clockwork or do others do this as well? Is it pulling with neutrino bolt? Are they healing the minor damage too fast? (Although the minor defense debuff should still be active for a moment after the attack)
I've pulled using this technique with a Sonic defender, and the Outcasts and Trolls don't like it just fine. They come a-running without much provocation on my part.
Anyone noticed anything like this recently?
I've noticed this kind of thing, at lower levels in particular; if you are *too* good at pulling, the mob may stand there bewildered, like its not sure where to find you. I think they may have "dumber" AI or lower perception assigned to mobs at lower levels to make it a bit easier on folks who are presumably just starting in the game, and aren't very good at pulling yet, don't have many ranged attacks to work with, don't know aggro radius yet, etc.
I haven't noticed recent changes, but its very rare we do any singles pulling with the friends I play with, usually just spawn pulling when they are too close to each other. So we get annoyed when just a single comes. 
I agree with the poster, it is a lost art. There are several reasons to pull, even sometimes with a tank present. However, the art of Pulling and Herding have seemed to fallen off in the last year.
Personally? Well I think there was a good deal of old timers that abruptly left the game after I5 came out. When I5 appeared I noted a drop off on the boards of postings by old timers. I noted nearly all the herd tanks simply disappeared. I noted that the old blasters seemed to go with them.
Anycase, last night was a PRIME example of me gritting my teeth. Even though we had a stone tank with us, if things did not keep a HIGH pace, the blaster on the team never failed to snipe. If the tank was 2 seconds behind his blast, the resulting AoE from the enemy tended to cause great harm to the squishies.
I remember grabbing off my headset, after a returned AoE faceplanted my Controller, and simply walked out of the room for about 10 minutes. When I returned, the entire team was faceplanted (except the stone tank who battled alone). Stupid stupid stupid hyperactive Blasters... Grrrrrrrr
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And an excellent guide it is, Dwimble. I was going to put a link to it, but you beat me to it. As far as I can recall, this has always been a problem. Partly it's because CoH tends to attact less experienced gamers. Partly it's because we heroes can so often succeed without tactics, although that's a lot less true now then it was a year ago. Communication and patience are both in short supply. People are content to throw themselves into the fight, die, try a couple more times, then either succeed through attrition or just give up. Using tactics is just too much work for most people.
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