Tank Meta, Support, and a Balancing of the Game

I was walking around contemplating my life in Bronze again today, which largely concerns itself with whether or not I should play tank support, mage support, or alternate and when to do it. What dawn on me was that I don't remember a time when Tank supports were the dominate meta (e.g. 3 support tanks in the top 10), and whether this is the resolution to the "dominant meta" issue we keep having.

Everyone complains about this meta being better than that meta. "omg, nothing is worse than the assassin meta!" "Are you dumb? the adc meta is hell!" "oh yeah, ok like mages don't just delete people"

To be fair, I've never, never understood the people complaining about the tank meta, but for the purposes of this post lets just say that it's a valid argument. I tend to read that tanks can't die and they have too much burst. I love playing tanks, and I feel like I've died plenty in every patch throughout time.

But if the meta was tank, and Riot incentivized the smartest role to tank as support, would this not resolve the issue?

The idea I've suggested over time that no one seems to even address is that they could give tank items negative abilities. e.g.

> Meat Shield: > +500 HP > +60 Armor > -10% Damage

That seems to me like it would stabilize the issue. Support tanks then become the best option to tank if a lot of tank items start looking like that. Damage means more assists and less kills, other roles are far less likely to take the items, and you could replace CS as a measure of grading with Damage taken because if you "never die" then what's the downside of getting out in front of things.

At any rate, I'm going down rabbit trails and the overall goal is:

tl;dr - make it a tank meta, and make tank items reduce damage.