"For an outside reference, D&D4E had a sort of "soft taunt" system that would place heavy penalties upon enemies for ignoring a tank/protector. I'd prefer something like this to a hard taunt that just overwrites the AI to attack a target mindlessly."
I agree with this immensely. It would give a great "tanky" feel. In D&D4e, which I DM'ed a great deal of, I had stupider enemies attack only the tank when they were taunted, while smarter ones would sometimes choose to take the penalty in order to attack a more strategically advantageous party member such as a healer. Either way, the taunt did make the tank be "tanky" whether the taunted enemy attacked them or not. I feel like, especially given some of the good AIs in DOS, something like this would work here as well.
I also agree very strongly with the overabundance of CC. Don't get me wrong, the ability to use CC, especially in conjunction with terrain effects, is one of the things I really like about DOS and DOS2. However, its duration is too long for most effects and it allows most or all of a party - friend or foe - to be stunlocked. Especially in multiplayer mode, where players control at most two characters, this can make combat seem boring at times when one or both of their characters are stunlocked for several rounds.
