Allowing the dragon to be used as tank is the design failure here. Without pet/npc tanking your melee have plenty to do there.
Allowing the dragon to be used as tank suggests the raiders make a choice here. I don't see how that fits as "design failure". The event is working perfectly as intended, imho. A raid without consequences for the players' decisions, is a bad raid.
If you dragon tank it, you obviously cannot melee it. But if you normal tank it, melee range is just fine. I'm not gonna teach you how to control push and avoid ae ramp. Shadow of Luclin ae ramps for 45k, this guy for 50k, and your gear is much better than RoF T3. I think we had like 3 or 4 melee deaths on the boss last week, with the whole raid's dps on him.
Well, if they make the choice to dragon tank it, then they shouldn't complain about the consequences of that decision for melee dps.
There is NO avoiding AE ramp. If you take a hit you run back and wait for heal. If you take 3 hits you click "accept rez". This is why I called such raids with heavy AE ramp design failures. But as this repeats and repeats again, I call them design faults now.And it's not 50k hits I remember about ...