A change headed to test
I see no reason why this should not trickle down to us as well.

As Soluss explained so nicely, they do have different skillsets of stances then we do.
In general it's dangerous to just read some patch notes and assume something if you don't know the class well (that's not directed at you in any way - just shows a bit why all other classes always assume we are uber now after they read our patch notes )

Actually, only warriors have stance related abilities, Dread Knights and Paladins can (faik) use any ability regardless of stance.
However, the penalties they have are so tiny anyway (and one could argue, bonuses, but their defensive stances are rather powerful, but offensive aren't at all).
Monk offensive stances are probably the most powerful of all melee stances, but we also have the more powerful disadvantages (which could be argued are still dissmissable, Dragon/Drunken mitigation penality is non-existant if the monk in question isn't tanking, 20% endurance cost reduction of Ti (which does limit the choice of Aum though) or cleric/bear shaman (or both) makes the Harmonious penalty nearly non-existant.)

They aren't really comparative, even though they are all called stances, they operate diffrently because of the diffrent intents between archetypes (and even within archetypes there's diffrences).