However, on a raid boss as melee DPS or tank I found it not that useful. Plenty of bosses are too large and have their nameplate off the screen, if you’re close (btw, does Al’Akir have a nameplate???). Then you need an alternative way of tracking DOTs. Caster DPS is a different story, and you boomkin example makes perfect sense. I can also see other scenarios that it is helpful, just not on raid bosses.

You can drop the Threat Plates part – Tidy Plates does all that you need. Simply put Tug-of-Threat > Threat Plates. But there are a couple of reasons that I use it over Threat Plates:
1. It incorporates multiple tank scenarios where you have a third colour for something safely being tanked by another tank.
2. Tidy plates allows you to see your debuffs on the name plates (on mouse over – which is required for the threat updates to occur anyway even within Threat Plates – it works out your threat by the colour of the aggro on the base ui frames) – so you can see your lacerate stacks on other mobs easily. (this might be possible on Threat Plates now – but I haven’t tried it in a while)
3. If I have a problem with Tidy Plates working it’s most often been because of Threat Plates breaking something!

Quick explanation: Tug-of-Threat adds an additional little bar above the name plate which shows the threat lead/loss you have so it provides a finer grain control over your threat and gives you more of a heads up over the colour change (I generally find that I move very quickly from yellow to red because it means someone (or more than one) is focusing that mob with direct attacks). Now going back to the original question – this is where tug-of-threat really wins out because it allows you to more specifically target the mobs you are losing threat to quickly – i.e. prioritise where you mangle goes. Apart from initial aggro I tend to favour using mangle and lacerate over swipe in a multiple mob situation – straight out aoe you’ll keep ahead of the dps with just swipe and thrash, but where it is a mix of aoe and focused dps (on multiple mobs) swipe doesn’t tend to cut it and mangle and lacerate ticks keep you ahead – the one thing I tend to (still) have trouble which is getting up pulverize as early as possible because I tend to split the lacerates around.

The one downside of Tidy Plates (using neon theme) is the default colours are terrible!

I generally use Shadowed Unit Frames (a unit frame replacement) and configure that to make my debuffs show huge under my target frame. Works much better for me.

If you pick one of the tidy plates themes (neon is quite minimalist) and then scroll down on the “Tidy Plates Hub: Damage” screen in Interface->Addons there is an option to “Show My Debuff Timers” you can even configure it to only show specific debuffs if you prefer.