Tranquility is situationally better than smokebomb. If you don't want to get outhealed by AG you're probably going to have to take vigil and take the damage loss. You're comparing 2 different spells anyway, ATM dps shaman's tide won't outheal tranq. Discussing how to make the other 90 talents outside of HotW equally compelling choices would be a far more constructive conversation than the one here, that's going nowhere fast.
'Dying' is a massive exaggeration. Damage-wise feral is on-par or above most other melee and it has the least downtime on bosses that aren't reachable by melee for a short period of time and their aoe is at or above most other melee as well. Most of this thread is incorrectly correlating the lack of a necessity to bring melee classes for a lot of encounters with ferals being in a bad spot.
Again, lack of representation doesn't equal a problem with the spec. Discussing more raid utility or cooldowns on any hybrid atm is incredibly unrealistic. Have you ever considered players just prefer other classes' playstyle more than feral or just want something braindead easy like elemental?