It was fleshed out to a degree suiting of the era where we had it. That being the pre-Legion era. The paradigm of class and spec design back then wasn’t to make specs into completely different entities(for them to have entirely separate toolkits, etc.).
The Hunter specs were perfectly fine for what was intended at the time. It’s true that what they were would not hold up going into Legion, due to it’s increased focus on spec identitites, but that’s besides the point and is a moot point since what we have now should not be applied to what we had prior to Legion.
The thing here is that the name Survival stems from the old talent category as it was from fairly early days of Vanilla. Back then the entirety of the category was about providing talents which focused on increasing our survivability, on a class-wide basis.
Back then, we did not have dedicated core specs that came with their own separate toolkits/playstyles.
Survivability in itself can be defined in many ways; you can increase your survivability through talents that provide straight defense, talents that increase your damage, talents that provide improvements to utility etc. etc.
Once they started to add more defining talents(in WotLK), the immediately went down the road of making SV into a “Munitions Expert/Trapper”-esque theme, this was further defined as time went on and more and more was made into baseline elements tied to the spec itself.
“Survival” as a name for the spec we saw from the end of WotLK - WoD, or even after when it became a melee-spec, does sort of fit, in the sense that it still does focus on survivability, just not in a way that resembles what was originally intended, before the era of Core Specializations.
But either way, the name itself is easily changed to fit the core theme and is in all honesty of less concern.
Throughout MoP and WoD we did not even have a talent-system that was based on spec-specific talents. The vast majority of them were shared amongst all 3 specs.
But before then, RSV certainly held multiple talents that have never been a part of anything other than SV(be it a talent category or a core spec).
See above. Again, that era had a completely different focus on how specs were designed. Specs weren’t intended to be completely their own thing(incl talents). The actual Core Specializations were their own thing, but anything outside of those, was intended to be shared amongst all specs, so there’s no point in arguing that those parts weren’t entirely unique, because it wasn’t the intent.
That only became a thing with Legion.
The things you said points towards this being an opinion of yours. If it’s not then…fair enough. But considering how you write, I can understand why some people, incl myself, would think otherwise.
Like I said above, it was perfectly fine for what was intended at the time in terms of class and spec design.
Going forward into Legion, they would have needed to add more to RSV as well to make it follow the criteria set for the new era.
The problem is that they didn’t…
Same as above.
Like all other specs, RSV was being further developed and was given more defining elements of it’s own. But when the time came to really double down on that; on individual spec identities post-MoP & WoD, instead of doing to RSV what they did to all other specs in the game, they opted to delete it from the class in it’s entirety.
THAT, is the main issue.
People can argue all day about how RSV was lacking parts that made it into it’s own thing entirely, and they are right, because before Legion, it was never intended for that to be the case.
For example, if they had done something like in the link below for RSV, when you compare that to current MM or BM, or SV for that matter, there would be no argument of whether the Munition Expert/Trapper-theme could be it’s own thing within the class: