How, pray tell, would you sufficiently differentiate another archer class (or even a spec) from marksman hunter?
A bow is a bow, you only shoot it one way. There’s not much else to it. There’s no foundation to create multiple variations of a class from. Marksman has the entirety of bow/gun/crossbow usage covered. Honestly, even beast mastery only uses the bow to support pet damage.
Yes, there’s multiple caster and melee classes in the game, but they each play differently and focus on different elements/combat styles. Mages and warlocks use different magics (other than some slight fire overlaps), as do balance druids and elemental shamans and shadow priests. Warriors and rogues are complete opposites in combat style, Paladins and deathknights mix opposing magic types with melee combat.
Without a massive overhaul to both the weapons and the class(es), there’s no way to add another bow/gun/crossbow user that feels unique and set apart from marksman hunter (or bm hunter). We dont have different ‘elements’ of bows, and unfortunately blizzard did not sufficiently differentiate the ranged weapons that we DO have. From the beginning, they SHOULD have made guns, crossbows, and bows all have drastically different qualities and features, from armor penetration values to ranges to accuracy to reload/firing times. Then there might’ve been room to make multiple ranged weapon users.
At this point the only ranged weapon user that we’re ever likely to see added is something based on thrown weapons, but guess what: Weapon throw is already available to rogues, warriors, and demon hunters.
People need to stop comparing classes this way and start comparing specs. What we had before was two ranged specs and a ranged/pet spec. Survival and marksman were too similar to one another, with the only thing setting survival apart being a couple of traps and some melee abilities (and the mix of ranged/melee abilities probably also made it more difficult to balance adequately). What hunters did not have was a melee spec, so they used that to set survival apart.
Personally, I like survival as it is (though I could, honestly, do with more melee abilities and less reliance on bombs and traps). I have an orc hunter that goes in with a 2h axe and smashes faces alongside his dire wolf, and that’s fun and fitting for the character theme. An orc playing legolas with a bow doesnt make any sense to me at all.