Appreciate the words. Having said that…
Well, that’s because they had a very different approach to talent design back then. What the overarching purpose of talent categories was, compared to the core specs/spec talent trees of today.
We talked about this in our latest “clash” as well, back in january. You questioned the motives and intentions of parts of our class design from the original game, and I replied with:
There were no core specializations in Vanilla. There wasn’t any intent towards providing players with dedicated playstyles through individual talent categories. There was only the core class toolkit, and the overarching purpose of that toolkit, as per your main role(hunter = damage dealer, most effective at range), and the various talent categories only served to enhance parts of our core toolkit, in ways that were/would be relevant in all parts of the game.
Beast Mastery: This category, its talent focused on improving everything that had to do with our pets, and other bestial aspects. It focused on increasing the survivability of our pets, the damage of our pets, certain pet-specific utility(Intimidation, IRP, etc.), and again, it provided options to improve our bestial aspects(Monkey/Hawk/Cheetah/Pack).
Marksmanship: Its talents focused on improving all aspects of the use of ranged weapons. Better damage, improvements to specific ranged utility(ImprCS, Scatter Shot), along with improved efficiency in terms of mana consumption, CDR, attack range, etc.
Survival: Its talents focused on improving all aspects of our survivability, allowing for better adaptation to specific situations(content). It improved our tracking capabilities(damage), our defensive options(for both melee and ranged), increased our stamina, bonuses to general class-wide utility such as Feign Death, and more-so, our Traps. It also provided enhancements to our melee-capabilities, talking both utility and damage*.
Was the purpose of the melee-oriented talents to make you want to intentionally go toe-to-toe with your enemies? Not at all, the purpose was to make us more efficient at dealing with situations where we would find ourselves forced to enter melee range. Why? Because we had hard restrictions put on our ranged weapons, where we could not use them at all when we were closer than 8 yards to an enemy. And in certain types of content(mainly PvP), you were naturally forced to spend more time in melee range of your enemies.