Do you think us hunters just sit around and twiddle our thumbs? It's insulting to insinuate we don't min-max ourselves - the difference is our max is low, lower than mages ever have been in MoP, and in most of Cata, etc etc, yet in all the class forums I read, you don't hear as much unjustified whining and "sky is falling" comments like the mage forums. You can see this in these infamous raidbots parses, where our "All parses" average is less than 500 dps behind our "Top 100" parses. Even our forums when people say "ermergerd hunters are shit," we just tell them to buck up and deal with it.
As to actual mage mechanics being used "unintentionally" or "not as designed," I dunno. It seems to reason foreseeing 6 stack camping would be relatively easy, as were the problems with fire before its nerfs. The playerbase is smart, but I don't think the designers are dumb. They intend for arcane to have burn phases at 6 stacks (just not indefinitely), they intended for you to use alter time to stack buffs/debuffs, they just didn't make the downsides large enough - in other words, they overtuned mages, like they always do. Mages aren't doing anything unintended, they're just overtuned. Simple as that.