I mean, obviously I can't disagree with formulations that haste, on paper, is more dps than mastery. Haste has -some- value while mastery has 0, in theory. That much is obvious. I'm saying that we get tossed in to situations where more mastery allows us to play more aggressively because mastery curbstomps haste in terms of survival, so having 5k more haste might increase your theoretical dps by 1.5%, but having 5k more mastery allows you to eg. comfortably use a breath of fire when otherwise you'd be tempted to purify a red stagger, and little opportunities like that add up over the course of the fight to something significantly more than 1.5% dps.
I don't have mathematical support, because there is none. What I do have is the experience of playing in a top end guild and pushing the boundaries of what a tank is able to do. Any model, even as accurate (or inaccurate as it may be) as simcraft will only show what a computer playing a character would perfectly do, and it's my contention that maybe ten players of each spec, worldwide, even approach 90% of a "perfect" rotation. In my judgment, you'd only have to execute at maybe 50-60% to rank at all, or only about 80% to rank #1. It's quite obvious to me, at least, that stats which allow you to more comfortably and consistently play your class are worth far, far more than min/maxing that last 1% of stats on your gear and saying that "yep, I'm good enough to handle this." Because you are not. I'm not. No one is. Everyone is prone to panic and mistakes; everyone will screw up their priority. I probably spend a good few percentages of each fight energy capped - not ideal, duh. I often delay keg smash for a jab. Wrong move there, retard - self. You know how many times I failed to get a keg smash off on a wave of ball lightnings for my Lei Shen parse? Four. Yeah, 4 out of 11 times the ball lightning spawned, I didn't even use one of my highest damaging aoe abilities. Am I still higher on that fight than the next highest player in the West by 20k? sure am.
Doing the most damage isn't a matter of what your optimum gear allows you to do, but rather a function of how much you will screw up multiplied by your gear, and mark me, you WILL screw up. So full crit ahead with all excess stats shunted towards haste might gain you a theoretical 1-2% damage but if you mess up even 5% more, then you've lost all your advantages and more besides, and a single panic situation is easily enough to lose you that 5%. I've dabbled with full crit, I've played full mastery more than probably anyone in the world, I've reforged excess stats to haste and mastery, and the ultimate conclusion I've come down to is - haste is garbage in any situation. 10n, 10h, 25n, 25h, LFR, challenge mode, soloing, scenarios, etc. etc.
I currently roll with ~11k mastery, which actually costs me somewhere in the realm of 4-5k crit even. And yet, my results speak for themselves. Can you come up with a better reason for why my gear, which is roughly 8-9% below "optimum dps stats", allows me these numbers?
I am a failure at tank damage. I absolutely miss chances to increase my damage. I incorrectly avoid the wrong mechanics, and incorrectly get hit by ones that I shouldn't. I don't always move the correct bosses in for cleave, and I most certainly don't optimally position mobs all the time. I fully admit that I fail over and over again as a tank. But that is immaterial as no one is perfect, and it seems that everyone else fails just as much if not more. Reducing the number of player fails will affect your damage far more than any gear optimization - this I can guarantee.