Well Armory hasn't updated yet (not your fault) so I will have to reply based on your responses.

1. I'd still hover my finger over a mana pot instead of a health pot. If mana begins to become an issue you can just periodically drop consecrate out of your rotation (and/or switch to seal of wisdom). Consecration costs baseline 22% of your base mana pool.

4. This one is big and I appologize if I end up going long winded here. The sockets colors are HOW you have to gem that socket to match. In the case of Retribution after you are hit capped Strength is by far and away your best stat. First for gaining 15% more of it with Divine Strength, second because of sheath of light and third because it scales with the almighty kings.

Every point of strength is worth roughly 2.5 attack power. And 30% of your AP is converted into SP which is in turn used to power your consecration, exorcism and judgement. So for 10 points of strength you get roughly 25 Attack power and 8 Spell damage. I used 10 because it is a nice even number. Stam doesn't give ret any additional value, as chances are if we are getting ready to take an early dirt nap on a boss fight your 480 extra stam from your soverign twilight opals won't save you. Especially in Ulduar. Also the 24 crit rating that you are getting from your gems (disregarding socket) is inbetween 0.75-1.00% chance to crit. Also crit rating does not scale with kings thus when you are under the effects of raid buffs you will get no additional value out of your gem.

What's more your 6 extraneous socket bonuses that you get have very little impact on your gear. With the RED you will gain your meta bonus already. So you will drop 6 hit (already over cap), 9 stam (90 health will not make a huge difference), 10 strength which when you change gems you will still end up with 14 more strength from new gems and 12 crit rating which is about another 1/3ish of a percent to crit.

Those are the 2 big things that struck out at me after rereading your reply. Once armory updates I will try to fill you in with anything else I might notice.

First of all, this is awesome already.  I appreciate you taking the time to evaluate my build/experience so quickly.  I have put the two points in SA for the same cheap reasons as a lot of prot pallys: my biggest fear is running out of mana.  I'm not glyphed for divine plea yet and I am always using SoW as well as judging for mana.  I run a lot of heroics since I'm not in a guild yet and unfortunately I'm not taking as much damage as I used to in them.  For that reason, while I am seeing an increase in my mana returned from BoS due to my increased mitigation/avoidance, I'm not receiving enough mana from the extra heals I would have needed before.  I have resorted to chain pulling in most heroics for as long as possible but that just takes its toll on my healer's mana instead of mine.  This has been something of a concern of mine and I appreciate your input.  I will change my build as soon as the server is up and glyph for divine plea and give it a test run.

Divinity - I understand over healing can be an issue but isn't my divinity just giving them more bang for their buck?  In other words, if they are healing me, they are getting larger heals and using less mana.  If healers are coordinating their heals and sticking to their assignments, over healing seems like a trivial stat to me.  Either way, I am very curious as to what you think I should put the points in if I were to drop divinity, because yes, they were junk spec points.  Are you in favor of reducing some of the points in it or dropping it all together?

Lifeward - I simply enchanted it to test out its effectiveness and because I was very low on gold.  I was using a titanium weapon chain before which I loved for its added mitigation.  This was a simple experiment with inadequate results and I am going bladeward today.

Hit/stam gems: I think its obvious why I would gem for stam and I am simply gemming for hit because most of my gear lacks it.  I am well below the hit cap (over 100 rating) and would be even worse off had I not gemmed for it.  Hit is super important for my threat generation but the number one issue is that I can't be missing taunts.  Do you recommend I gem for mitigation/avoidance and forget about the whole hit cap?

Sons of Hodir rep:  On my last server (Cho'gall), the horde outnumbered us by about 8 to 1 which is not an exaggeration.   I simply did not find it as an effective use of my time to grind out dailies in the horde infested stormpeaks for 20 days to get 5 more dodge rating and defense rating.  For reasons like this I recently switched to the magical land of Gorgonnash where the playing fields have leveled drastically.  I'll be getting my rep to exalted soon enough.

My ulduar experience is very limited.  I have tanked and dpsed everything up to Hodir but I have not been successful with all of them.  This is why you will see random kills here and there on my statistics.  After all, this is one of my main reasons for applying to your guild; I want to be a part of a team that can clear content with competence and have fun doing it.

Thank you again for your feedback.  You've forced me to put my thinking cap on already and I'm not even in your guild yet, which is amazing.  I hope this helps your understanding of my thinking (or sometimes not thinking) in the game.