Don’t beat yourself up for the +15 - they’re tough.
+15 is a point at which everyone needs to perform. DPS is significantly lower? The encounters last too long and the healer and you run out of cooldowns to live, you start falling behind and running out of steam.
Healer throughput isn’t there? He has to spend more GCD’s keeping the DPS alive and can’t give you as much attention.
Your rotation / cooldown usage isn’t quite 80-90% correct or you pulled extra? You’re gonna get slammed. As an example, I’ve messed up +15 DoS multiple times before I learned certain things - e.g. there is a pack for which I MUST have Kings, or there is a high chance of getting globalled.
These are things you have to learn - do not expect to walk into a +15 with a group of ilvl 210-215 and cakewalk it - it is still hard and you NEED to know the dungeon.
Of course, it absolutely sucks that the dungeon drops loot of ilvl 210 but you pretty much need to play perfect / extremely well as a group at an ilvl where you will no longer get any upgrades. It’s simply badly tuned.
To clarify a couple of your points regarding the talents - your will most likely want Unbreakable Spirit for the Ardent Defender CD and always, always Consecrated Ground for the kiting. FYI, the ‘Hand of the Protector’ talent is only for the teammates, it has no effect on your self-healing. If you’re speccing into HotP to keep the group alive, your healer needs to pick up slack, as almost all of your Holy Power should be spent on yourself. There are minor occasions when you can save someone from the brink of death with a WoG, but then whether you heal them for 8k or 28k, it doesn’t matter, as long as they don’t die.
Prot paladin is a high skillcap tank, much harder than other tanks, but very rewarding and fun.
Personally, I have no problem facetanking 99% of all dungeons at +15. Gearing correctly plays a big part, experience, and knowing when to kite. If you are spamming WoG, then you are definitely doing something wrong or the healer is performing very badly. I heal WoG every now and then and most of my healing is passive healing from consecration. I help healers TREMENDOUSLY with judgement of the light, keeping the group alive, especially during pride, they crit heal 500+ each time a player hits pride.
I usually compete with Dpsers on DPS as Prot pala and in many cases end up 3rd on DPS, beating one of the DPSers. In raid, I easily pull around 4K dps on raidbosses(except for fights where you have to run with bombs and stuff).
Prot paladins always have it rough start of expansion, they scale well later on and contribute far more to the group then any other tank when in the right hand. I can basically full heal a group of players while tanking keys, for example, only tank that can do that. It is also the only tank that can remove any debuff stacks and have immunity to any type of damage. There is so much potential in this spec compared to other tanks.
For into, SOTR ATM is weak but it has a hidden multiplier that scales well with STR. The more you get STR, the much higher armor it will have.
Been running the 13-16 range this week after being away from the game for two months and at 213ilvl now I feel VERY squishy. Not really enjoying the “get aggro and run for your life” tanking style that’s needed on a lot of pulls to be frank.
You are in 223 gear which massively outsrips most of the playerbase. At that ivll you should/could be tanking 20s being that gear scales geometrically/exponentially. So hardly a yardstick.