While we can’t say for sure, where their minds are at right now, they have made some comments on the matter, in the past.
I spoke to Chris Kaleiki, a former class dev who worked on the hunter class more or less since TBC(in preparation for WotLK), in a short conversation about the history of this class. Note that this was not any sort of “formal” interview or anything, nor does anything he said necessarily reflect on what the current dev team thinks of the matter. He said that, internally, they thought of the pre-Legion Survival design and fantasy “to not be quite as developed, and was lacking a bit (of depth)”.
Apparently, they had noticed “the few, but vocal, number of players who wanted a melee spec, and thought it would be a good way to break up the three specs available to us”. This was based on their change in philosophy of class/spec design, going into Legion.
He himself(Chris) did not agree with the decision to rework Survival to melee, due to how “it disenfranchised all of the players who were fond of the original gameplay”, from before Legion.
Having said that, here’s some of what they’ve come out and said in official interviews:
Q: You guys also oversee all the other classes. Are there any particular changes that you’re most excited about?
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And then Survival Hunter…Travis: It was another one that was missing its niche. It’s kind of like Marksman except more traps? Or different arrows? So it was kind of missing that “what is the core fantasy?”
Having it move into the melee space and actually return to its roots that was the vanilla Survival experience. You got your Raptor Strike and all that and having those come back and play a role, moving into melee, giving mobility like the Harpoon to draw you in – it’s like it finally gave them a unique identity. If this is the beast companion guy that you’ve always wanted to play then you’re going to have that role.
Generally those are the ones that probably got the most drastic changes but every single class – I think one of the things that’s fun to see is when you go into a five-man dungeon now and you can actually pretty readily, visually go: “Oh look the Rogue is doing his roll of the dice right now” or “Oh look the Paladin just threw his hammer.”
You get more flavor both visually and also as a player. That feeling of “What is that experience that I wanted?” and it delivers a little bit more for every class now.
Ion have also said something similar in a few interviews, when asked about Survival.
Reading between the lines, in short, they applied a certain logic to the design of the hunter class, a logic that wasn’t applied to all other classes/specs at the time. Basically, they thought that there couldn’t be two specs where both of them had a focus on the use of ranged weaponry. More importantly, rather than doing what they did with all other specs, by developing them to become even more defined in their existing themes/fantasies, they scrapped RSV/old SV without even bothering to try to make it distinguish itself further, from the other hunter specs.
Is the concept in [this link] “perfect”, from a design perspective? Most likely not. But it sure as heck wouldn’t play anything like current MM. The main point is that they could’ve done the same to SV, as they did to all other specs, going into Legion. But they didn’t…
This is why we’re still here, petitioning for the return of RSV. Contrary to the opinion of some, based on what they/the devs said, it wasn’t justified to remove the spec. Something that’s especially obvious, given what they’ve done with SV since. Note how they’ve stamped SV as the “beast companion guy”, which is how they had previously branded BM, since the start 