[SolAndLuna]

Agreed on this, honestly. One thing that isn't noted here that might be important, though, is how difficult it is to even use evasion compared to defense, actually.

Under normal circumstances, the average person will have... maybe 200-220 evade if they're building for it. On the other side of things, someone using basic attacks normally will have roughly 270-300 hit if they can manage it. So, in a best case scenario, you'll have a 50% chance to dodge a basic attack (and by extension, trigger Evasion against autohits) and almost no chance of evasion in a worst case. Fortunately, there are numerous skills, as well as the Miragewalk enchant, to help with this, so after about a turn, people can be at close to 300 evade nearly consistently. However, it doesn't completely protect them from autohits, which they will still get hit by, albeit with 30% damage reduction on top of the 10 or so Defense someone might have. In addition, there are some classes that can reach 350 or even 400 hit if they know what they're doing, so even then, despite everything, it's entirely possible for someone to focus on evasion and still get hit consistently by basic attacks.

By comparison, the Defense and Resistance stats will normally reduce damage by 40-50%. Then they have the advantage of Armor that the majority of evasive builds are unable to use, lowering damage by a flat amount. Then they get further bonuses to their damage reduction from equipment like the Turtle Shell, making for roughly 60% damage reduction without any additional preparation. Then they have various skills that they can use to further lower the damage taken to them, like Wraithguard or using Shared Pain with a youkai. Then there's resistances, if the person has those. At the end of the day, the amount of damage taken becomes negligible at best compared to the 30% reduction Evasion gives. They're weak to Vorpal Strike, but that's a 10% on a critical hit, and it's entirely possible for a tank to have enough crit evade to avoid that altogether against a decent number of people. There are also methods to lower defense or increase damage dealt to an opponent, but those are few and far between, and oftentimes work better against evasive characters, with the exception of a sufficiently high power weapon with the Rampaging enchant or a Buster Cannon, which very few can reliably use without harming their character in other ways.

To summarize, tanks need no preparation to reliably reduce damage, while evasive characters do. Despite this, evasive characters regularly take more damage than tanks due to the prevalence of autohits. The only real option is building with additional defensive options - at which point, aside from wanting to play a wind mage or just a particularly fast character, what's the point of building for evasion when you're trying to add some defense already?