No one at Blizzard has obviously played Rupture since launch - working as intended 
What’s the Rend issue? Seems like it’s in an ok spot.
Comparative to DS and Upheaval in S4 not so much. It will be great to be able to Temper the Rend effective size increase but that really should be baked into the Skill. There are not any Aspects or Uniques really that are “Rend” specific. Ravenous is mostly a Brawling Ring that enables Bleeding on enemies. It is fairly odd. Slaking is underwhelming. When you realize that the damage is dealt over 5 seconds also, that high damage value seems pretty low if you divided it by 5 and had a skill you spammed every second.
IMO - Rend should have an Offensive Aspect that makes the attack AoE and increases Damage. Rend suffers from the entire issue with Bleeds requiring more investment than other skills and more synergies tied up. Gushing Wounds is set up to be the Bleed activator but does not seem to scale or work properly. It has you invest in Critical Strike Chance, Critical Hit Damage, and Overpower despite the Bleed portion not being able to Critically Strike or Overpower. GW should allow Bleeds to Crit, the CHD should calculate properly, and GW should have chance to proc on the application AND DoT.
Most Bleed mechanics are also relegated to “On Application” which means “Initial Hit only” and not the DoT portion itself. This needs to be re-evaluated as the DoT becomes less interesting.
Oh was thinking there was a bug I didn’t know about. Rend could do Pit200 and honestly seemed like a fair build compared to some of the other stuff in PTR. Bleed needs a couple tweaks and as you said maybe give Rend more range so you don’t have to temper as much for it (but oh boy is max range glorious).