Well yes I can, because its my own mind !
I played survival hunter during Vanilla.
But hey, you keep believing that SV tree made you a melee hunter, more power to you.
If you think that SV tree was a melee dps tree, maybe you should take another hard look at the actual talents.
There were hardly any talents that directly boosted melee damage, instead they boosted survivability and gave you tools to kite/snare.
One of the main PvP lines was 21 points in MM for Scatter Shot and 30 points in SV for Lightning reflexes. It gave you strong ranged sustained damage and when in melee you could do 2-3 strong attacks which would snare/root the opponent so you could get back into ranged.
SV was still a ranged spec, just with respectable melee damage vs melee classes when they used their tools to get in your melee range.
NOTE: Unless you're of course talking about the first year of SV before the hunter patch, but I don't see how that was even a thing. The fact it was changed so fast after release shows that the developpers didn't like that branch of hunter.
There was a reason that was changed. Even more so than SV in Legion/BFA; nobody I know played SV in pre-1.7 and enjoyed it. I remember a ton of forum posts on how badly people wanted SV changed back then.