Like most of your posts on the matter, you're both full of it here. Yes, people have asked for a melee Hunter spec in the past. People have also asked for a melee Mage and a tanking Shaman. You still have people who ask for the return of archaic bullshit mechanics that add nothing but inconvenience like ammo and weapon skills. You even have people demanding outrageous Everquest-style death penalties where you drop all your shit when you die.
People ask for stupid crap all the time on the forums. You can come up with any flawed-to-the-core idea and post it on the forums and you can guarantee that you'll find at least a small number of people on the forums who agree. I've said it before: you could go on the forums and demand that Blizzard remove the Druid class from the game and I guarantee you will have people support that idea with 100% sincerety. God damn, I guarantee you'll have actual
Druid mains supporting the idea. Sure, it will be almost no one but they will still be there.
Does that description in the last sentence sound familiar? It should, because it perfectly describes the demographic of "Hunters who like melee". The problem with these ideas is that they are all very unpopular and pursuing any of them would end up pissing off far more people than those they satisfy. You can't just entertain every idea that people come up with, especially those that actively infringe on the playstyle of others as changing one of the Hunter spec to melee does. A melee Hunter was one of those niche forum ideas that would pop up every once in a while. Obviously changing one of the Hunter specs to melee would piss off the ranged Hunters, and those Hunters far outnumber the ones that want melee. And this isn't even hypothetical, anymore. This has all happened now: they made melee Hunters, it's flopped pretty spectacularly, all the obviously-correct predictions have been proven correct, and there are a lot of pissed off Hunters. Even Blizzard is now admitting the melee Hunter idea was a niche one that wouldn't appeal to most existing Hunters. There's simply no pretending anymore that this was ever a popular idea. That ship has sailed.
As @
SnowTang said, you can
absolutely speak for the majority of Hunters when you say a melee spec wasn't wanted because the vast majority (i.e. ~98%) of Hunters are not playing it and they sure as hell aren't showing any signs of warming up to it. Even when Survival was the numerically superior option they weren't switching. How much longer can you pretend that this spec has an audience? How many more times are you willing to be proven wrong?
Boy is this a lot of misinformation packed into one post.
Firstly, the current most popular Hunter spec is the one that performs worst out of the three, so you are shown to be talking out your ass immediately... as in, on the very first sentence. Moving on from that, Survival itself was the most popular spec during Siege of Orgrimmar when it was outdamaged by BM for that tier. Meanwhile, Survival as melee failed to move beyond 3% of Hunter parses in mythic raiding even when it was the very best Hunter spec for 7.1.5 and Nighthold. Numerical performance is no longer an excuse when it comes to Survival.
Secondly, you can't act like any other spec revamp holds a candle to the total removal and replacement that was Survival in Legion. Even largely changed specs like the ones you mentioned retain at least some of their prior playstyle and theme; Survival does not. The only thing it has in common with its former self is utility that is core to the class and shared by other specs. Every. Single. Mechanic. Is. Gone. Extent matters here; don't pretend that it doesn't.
Finally, no Hunter spec has ever been fully melee before Legion. Not even Survival. Legion Survival is the first time any Hunter spec has not had a ranged weapon. Even in early Vanilla when Survival had the utterly-useless Lacerate as its final talent, it still primarily used a ranged weapon with Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, and Serpent Sting. The spec augmented your melee capabilities but it certainly didn't try to make it the sole focus. That was never the intention. Plus, the whole "some ranged, some melee" approach didn't work out and that's why they moved away from it. Why the fuck should we be returning to a failed design?
Why did we need a melee spec? We already had 3 ranged specs and people had developed their favourite playstyles, what pressure was there to take people's favourite spec away and turn it to something nearly no one wanted? Be careful when you use the word "need" in this debate because, given the circumstances of the introduction of the melee spec, you can guarantee it will come back around to fuck you up.
You may go nuts over a melee mage spec, but a) it's doubtful you will actually ever sink much time into it (look at all the "I would definitely play a melee Hunter" people who were total no-shows to Survival this expansion) and b) that would be fucking over all the people who like whatever mage spec gets cut for the melee one to happen, just for the sake of the mild interest of people like you. Survival has proven that this sort of class design is crap. Proponents of it are in no position to push it further.
Also, I distinctly remember this being explained to you many times in a number of different threads over the past year. Cramming two specs in one is a bad idea. You end up with one or two watered-down options and completely limit the ability to iterate on either design. In reality, instead of deflecting blame to another spec, the criticism should be focused on the spec at fault, which is unequivocally Survival.