As with most things, its in the eye of the beholder. A removeable rune effect is nice to have regardless. I don't struggle with agro though. I don't see a huge agro increase from CS effects either. When I want agro I generally can take it.
To my knowledge they have not removed agro from the healing light proc, which actually makes a CS weapon more dangerous for me in groups. The issue of healing a puller during a split is real with the healing proc range the way it is, so my only recourse is to not use stuns when that is the situation. Having a CS aug in my best 1hander gives me an uncontrollable element to my healing light procs if it does trigger this.
I'll see if I can get this to trigger on my 2h which does have a CS effect on it and I'll report back here.
As far as your pally friend, one thing is certain. Not all paladins really know what they are talking about. I was recently in an argument with a paladin on the main sony boards because he insisted that slay3 was a 500% boost to our DPS against undead. He had played a paladin a long time, yet still didn't understand some fundamental things or how to interrerpt(sp?) his own "testing" cycles. I don't exclude myself from this either, don't believe me just because, I could be wrong; best bet is to always test things yourself as fully as you can.
So far in my opinion, the rune effect isn't worth the long camp yet
/shrug, to each their own. Lots of good ways to test the AE agro of rune, some listed here.