id say play whatever suits ya. a well played paladin will stay up longer against a relativ hard mob than a sk. i tested that with a similar sk geared friend soloing in hos. we both were able to bring life mobs down, i had, using burst and hots, a lot easier time though. sks may have it easier against relativly easy mobs though. and, of course, sooner or later the pally runs oom. but with todays regen rate... who cares?
a paladin can also do cc while tanking (shackles ftw), buff, do huge dps to undead (thats always fun imo. even after all these years). and, as it already has been said, has a strong support role on raids. of course sks have other advantages, ya mentioned some of them. to me its the ae aggro i really envy, even if a good pally can cycle stuns through targets and can keep aggro on definitly more than 1 mob, assuming the group behaves. and if they dont... blame the cleric!
to me in the end, all tanks are - in groups - more or less equal, question is how well they are played. id say playin the pally to the max is just the hardest (if playing a comp game can be described as hard after all), ya have to mash more hotkeys than the other classes and have to cycle more between targets and yourself and target. warrior, id say, is easiest. of course, ppl will disagree with that
c.