Aside from being ridiculously high melee DPS (which they are not and should be)

Monks should be the 4th best tank in the game, period.  Obviously healers shouldn't be able to hold aggro, because with their overpowered healing abilities they can keep themselves alive for a very long time, and if they could hold aggro well enough they would make the tanking classes completely obsolete.  The other DPS classes have quite a substantial list of things they can do better than the monk, (DPS being one of them) therefore the monk should bridge this gap of lack of utility with tanking ability. 

right now, monks are a waste of space.  Basically they are obsolete, with subpar damage, and even rangers tank better, so subpar defensive ability also, and next to no utility.  If they were removed from the game it would be like putting the lame horse out of its misery.  Since no one on the dev side seems capable of figuring out a fair and decent balance for them with the other classes (despite the hours and hours of effort put forth by this community and by Quinn) they might as well get rid of the monk class.

I disagree with the tanking. It wasn't listed anywhere in the description, and I don't like to tank. We should be able to take more damage than we currently can, because we're still fighters, but tanking is a different matter altogether.

As far as DPS is concerned, I'd like to see offensive fighters on the following scale:
1- Rogues: their damage is so situational it has to be highest.
2- Monks. We bring NOTHING to a group but DPS as it currently stands
3- Rangers: equal damage to monks, but ranged. Melee DPS: about a Bard's.
4- Bards: because they have so much versatility where buffing and CC are conerned, obviously less damage.

Where utility is concerned, here are a few ideas:
a) gives us the ability to 'counterspell' melee AEs through the form of a reactive ability. Think of it as knocking down someone who's performing a spinning kick, for example.
b) Replace Reed in the Wind with an ability that guarantees 100% dodge chance for 8/10 seconds (down from 10/13), instead of increasing said Dodge chance by 100%. This would make the ability useful, would allow us to be better pullers. Keep the timer as it is.
c) Increase the healing amount on Ignore Pain by 100% and allow us to use it on other players.
d) Give us some sort of diversion ability, that could operate much like a pacify/lull ability could work, to assist us in pulling while FD is being worked on. Adding it permanently wouldn't be a bad idea, either. I'd suggest the maximum mobs you could create a diversion for to total one sub 35-ish, then perhaps up the total to two 35+.
e) for Harmonious: more debuffs. Perhaps a stifle/silence type ability or an ability that guarantees to interrupt casting.
f) for Drunken Style: more reliable evasion, better aggro control. Perhaps an endurance draining ability to be used on a mob, along the lines of: you use the opponent's strength against them, and force them to exert themselves.
g) for Dragons: an AE cone stun useable at will on a timer (unlike Dragon Rakes its Claws). Some type of hammering ability, where you sacrifice all the Jin and Endurance you have left into one very damaging punch/kick/AE. We're the hard style, are we not?

As for weaknesses, I'd suggest:
- No ranged damage besides the measly Shuriken. Perhaps remove the Shuriken specialisation skill as well to bring us more in line with the 'up close and personal' paradigm.
- No stealth/invis (which all of the other melee DPS classes get)
- Perhaps even take away Nerve Strike, IF d) above is granted. I'd rather pull one less mob wtihout the other mob being aggro, than for it to stand still for 30 secs and then come.

hi there :-)
I pretty much love the idea to make us the most defensive offensive fighters through evade/parry with awesome counterattacks hence we don´t have the aggro most of the time (well atleast I dont have it :-/ the trigger for the counterattacks should be a 10m radius)

I love the whole d&d monk concept and would love to see this beeing the concept for vanguard monks
some of the abilties that could be in would be:

beeing able to catch projectiles (5minute buff with 10minute recast perhaps 4 jin cost:

first rank:  you catch any normal projectile with 50% chance and render it harmless
second rank:  you catch any normal projectiles with a 50% chance and throw it back to the attacker
third rank:  you catch any normal projectiles in a 10m radius arround you 50%chance and throw it back to the attacker
fourth rank: you catch any normal and magical projectile (ranger special shots, bolt casts etc) in a 10m radius 50% chance and throw them back at the attacker

advanced evade (upgrade to swaying step):
first rank: you are abe to partially evade any none direct damage spells (bolts, ae damage, stuff falling on your head etc ) you mitgate 50% of the damage
second rank: you are able to fully evade none direct damage spells

Don’t we have 3 mastery styles for a reason? 

People want to be crappy tanks they should have to choose drunken style which should have skill sets that allow them to do that. 

No way should the crappy tank style do as much DPS and the Crappy DPS style lets call this one Dragon .. this style should do the most dps and have the least utility.. its all about the crappy dps here.  We can lose the crappy AE crap as well. Just focus on DPS. 

Then we could have a crappy debuff style hmm lets call this one harmonious, this one does decent crappy dps once it has its debuffs on heck we could even give this style some crappy group utility, but this style still wont do as much dps as the crappy dps style.

Now just make all these styles NOT crappy. 

We're all beating a dead horse here.

Most of the ideas (i say most a few are new to me) have been said already and have been brought up for the past 3-5 months now.  Face it guys, i love martial arts and high damage as much as the next guy, but it's not happening.  It won't happen as long as that dumb ass David Gilbertson is still in charge.  at the moment there are NO plans for class revamps on the schedule at this time.  I know you guys hope Sony will fix this game, but David Gilbertson is STILL basically the guy in charge, calling the shots.  And he's an idiot.  Watch this video to see what the upcoming plans for VG are, Class balancing is not one of them.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?type=wmv&id=19787

Wasnt this guy the same one that basically ignored everyone elses class inputs and did whatever he wanted?  I do still have hope, I still actually play my monk at 50, but I know that lots of the community is dispersing quickly...  This game needs Raid content and its still 2 months off.... what are they doing with their people??

Yeah. I'm more and more convinced that the monk is "finished" so to speak. Our dps is where it's suppposed to be and we're again ment to be fd pullers in raids... That is, when mobs are unpacifiable or unmezzable as those are  the superior methods for pulling. Our utlility will also remain just that, pullers and perhaps wipe-recovery.