Yep. People laud its fearsome reputation but in the end the Tiger tank was of the paper variety. The Panther and the Tiger (Tiger less so than the Panther) are case studies in why armor thickness and gun performance are not even the most important features of a battletank.
The most important thing a battletank can do is permit your army to fight in all situations in a method of battle that accomplishes its strategic objectives.
With its legendary lack of maintenance requirements, reasonable speed and engine performance and, decent gun simple and easy operation, the Sherman fulfilled the needs of the American army that liked to attack aggressively and needed good tanks with speed and in large numbers to do this. By being a reliable enough machine to permit aggressive leaders to carry the attack more sustainably, and in more different terrains and weather conditions, than any other tank in the war the Sherman made generals like George Patton its champion and made itself a war winner.
With its ability to be mass produced with legendary simplicy, as well as the fact that any Russian peasant could be hauled out of the infantry, thrown headlong into the tank and quickly learn how to operate it, the T-34 served Soviet strategic needs by allowing them to keep the numbers of active tanks strong enough to check and counter the enemy simultaneously in the middle of a war of attrition with a more technologically advanced superpower. Soviet generals managed what French commanders failed -- turn their defense into a quagmire into which German armies entered and did not return, and as an attritional war tank, the T-34 is without peer in WWII because of just how many you could lose and still have factories churning out fresh fighting forces of brand-new T-34's. to go over the top in the next wave. This ability to bring ever and ever new T-34's into exhausted Wehrmacht units was what ultimately drove the Reich back all the way to Berlin and beyond.
The Tiger didn't really do this and the Panther certainly didn't. They were tank killers almost exclusively against enemies that were heavy with infantry, their mechanical unreliability played against the need of the Wehrmacht to counterattack in order to survive the war (more Panthers and Tigers were lost in counterattacks than were lost in any other type of war operation and it was in German counterattacks where the kill ratios always least favored German armor), and the overall all-situation performance you need from a frontline battletank was just not there with either of these tanks but especially not the Panther.
The Tiger in particular also wasn't a particularly forward thinking tank. The thing was basically an overgrown Pz IV. Armor thickness was all it really had going for it but it was still a box with 90 degree sides, which was known at the time to be a very poor way to lay out tank armor (even technological dead ends like the M3 medium and the Char B1 had frontal sloping).
At least when the Americans tried the exact same stunt with the M6 heavy (AKA the Sherman XXXL) they had the good sense to get a good look at the result and not send it into battle.
The Tiger was yet another rush job that limped along for awhile because they took old ideas and got the most they could out of them but it was ultimately a technological dead and and dare I say it, a failed tank. for all its tremendous reputation the Tiger did not accomplish what Germany needed out of a frontline heavy tank and the resources spent developing and building Tigers should probably have been spent elsewhere.
I read somewhere that you could build 5 StuG III's for the cost in material and man-hours spent to build a single Henschel Tiger and 5 StuG's was much closer to what Germany needed at the time, or perhaps a dozen or so truck towed crew served PaK 40 75mm AT guns. They were desperate to make up the growing disparities in numbers and the Tiger played against that. Their effort to counter quantity with quality was interesting, but ultimately they lacked the teconology to really accomplish that end.
