I think if there was any era for it, this would probably be it. Mid-late Velious where knights have their upgraded skill caps, but prior to 1) AAs and 2) Discipline System Revamp (group-timers)
AAs may widen the HP+mitigation/avoidance gap, but the main thing differentiating the two is AE taunt. Knights could get 1200 threat a cast, but they lacked anything like AE taunt - i.e a 100% success rate taunt (the AE part of it being icing on the cake). A single ability which guarantees the person goes to the top of the aggro list. So, you can seamless transition from WS ranger or prior defensive warrior to the next.
The other key ability that knights lack is an instant burst avoidance ability for getting a CHeal chain switched over -i.e. furious, fortitude, weaponshield, etc. The discipline system revamp put these abilities on separate timers than defensive.
Those are the main two abilities knights lacked to raid tank well. Obviously, warriors also have a natural advantage in terms of HP and AC softcap returns. Knights do eventually get a defensive-type ability something like 10 years later, but iirc it's capped (at least initially) at some number of damage mitigated.
Knights are the red-headed step child of early EQ. In an ideal world, you'd want 1 Paladin to buff DS and 0 SKs. Later on, there's occasionally a mob that fears where they offer some advantage, occasionally a mob like Arch Lich that can be cheesed via Knight, a random DA hammer for rolling the dice with rampages, and the occasional useless AA ability that could crash the zone to respawn PoFire. But that's pretty much it.
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