Dance of Death is just a stat proc tho and could easily have done the exact same thing even if Barbed Shot didn't replace Dire Beast. Crits had also reset Dire Beast back then as well. I personally like the flavor of Dire Beast (with the glyph of Dire Stable) way more than Barbed Shot. I feel like they could give us the best of both worlds and instead of the whistle/wave animation that Dire Beast had, have us launch a shot with a piece of bait attached to it that attracts the dire beast to attack the target. We'd keep the weapon firing animation aspect of the ability and get back the army of pets...Or they could give us both abilities at once and instead of the bleed, Barbed could debuff the target to take increased damage from pets for X amount of time. Both abilities would have two charges and grant Frenzy to your pet but they share a cooldown. So you'd maintain that debuff on the target and then throw out Dire Beasts during resets if the debuff isn't going to expire.
There are plenty of ways they could handle it to give the best of both aspects, and somebody could come up with something better, but I'd like the swarm of beasts back. With the glyph if almost felt like having MoP Stampede back at times, just not as powerful.