I'm glad for you, and I'm glad your guild lets you do that.

But what you are doing is still sub-optimal for any raid, and you would be far, FAR better off using a Feral Druid in that instance with full DPS gear on.

Feral Druids are the perfect Hybrids at the moment, whereas Paladins and to a lesser extent Warriors are pigeonholed via spec. Heal/Tank all you want as Prot, you are still performing a sub optimal role which has no place in raiding as far as I am concerned. Until I hear people say "man I wish we had a prot Paladin" or "We need you to respec" the class is still unbalanced and still fails in a min/max environ which is what raiding boils down to.

Yeah, but the first add doesn't hit hard enough to make crushes worth worrying about, as long as you give your healers a little warning. When I tank the first one I just go for max spelldamage and mp5 so I can heal decently afterwards. I've never really had a problem with it.

EDIT: Mind you, a 41/20/0 paladin is probably a better choice for that slot, though.

Because in our guild we have prot warriors and dps warriors.

The dps warriors are 3x/2x/0, and have no points in prot, they rarely, if ever tank. The prot warriors are x/x/4x Prot.

Every paladin in the guild is 4x/1x/0

Yet when a prot warrior doesn't need a tanking piece, it has been defaulted to the dps warriors with zero talent points in prot (for going on months now) over any of the paladins, because even IF the maintanks quit, the dps warriors could respec and be a viable raid tank, wheras the paladins are not considered viable outside of their healing role in my guild. All of our offtanking is done by ferals.

Not every guild like that obviously, but mine is, which is why I made the distinction.

It doesn't matter how seriously Blizzard takes prot paladins until the players feel that way. Any guild starting BT that doesn't use them already is going to see those boots drop, give them to a warrior, and maybe whine a little that they don't have agility instead of spell damage. I suspect this will be the case even when paladins are balanced fully; we'd need to be overbalanced beta-feral style to get more people to try it out and have a more even representation.

If all warriors could do was tank, I don't think anyone would disagree with you. But warriors are not a pure class, why is their tanking treated like one?

Paladins are the "least hybrid" hybrid class at the moment. It is overlooked because we are exceptional healers, both in PvE and PvP, but the way the distribution of raiding classes goes right now, paladins are the primary healers and nothing else.

Also, this. You have a few ways to look at hybrids:

1) Able to perform multiple roles, but only one at a given time with spec/gear. Makes up for being worse than a pure class through synergistic abilities.
2) Able to perform multiple roles at the same time, using the same gear. Makes up for being worse than a pure class through this multi-tasking ability.

In both cases, hybrids make up for being "worse" than pure classes by providing an auxiliary benefit. I would say right now that shaman, priests, and warriors all fit nicely into #1. Druids fit nicely into #2, and occasionally warriors as well.

For the most part, paladins are neither of these in high-end raiding. Their synergistic abilities are either non-existent (prot) or too weak (Ret) to make up for not being a pure class in #1, and the sheer stat dependency on gear basically rules out #2.

As someone suggested on page 1, a Paladin tank is great for the Al'ar encounter. We always have one of our holy paladins respec for this fight. Generally Paladin tanking is very well suited to tank lots of low hitting melee mobs, but the way the adds spawn and usually aggro on healers right after they show up make a Paladin the best off-tank for this fight as it's the only class with both a range taunt and a serious range aggro move.
Also the Paladin taunt mechanic taking aggro from all mobs that are on one player is superior as all new spawns typically aggro on one guy.