Even in the best case scenario 30% crit mag a little over 35% of the time is not better than 40% more mastery/offence, especially since the latter benefits both crits and non crits. The math here should be obvious. Ideally in red you'd want to be in both states but that's not sustainable so yes in fact you do want to wait in Battle Readied. Go ahead and post an impressive parse video if you want to prove me wrong, I'm open to the possibility.

And even discounting the particulars here, let's say you're right and Battle Hardened does more damage. So what? You're still making the same argument, that you want to wait in a particular combat state rather than use the unlocked Blade of Elendil. This is counter intuitive and unfun design. And of course this is strictly red we're talking about, in other trait lines, particularly yellow, you wait in the state until you can immediately re-enter it every single time in your rotation.

And how can you be against more AoE? Don't you tank on Captain, you can't just rely on Elendil's Roar which has a 30s CD. Being able to hit all the trash mobs with Pressing Attack/Routing Cry is a problem because of their extremely low target counts, even with a gold tracery it tops out at 9 and 8 respectively.