I fail to see how this is an “angry whine.” It was pointed out (all of the above) in Beta and PTR, so it’s more disappointment.
As for Prowl, I consider it a class defining ability. In fact, the whole cat is balanced around it and around bleeds, none of which are available for close to 1/3 of the leveling experience. Yes, leveling is fast, but unless you’re only happy at max level and don’t care about the process of getting there at all, not having many class defining tools for close to 3/5th of the leveling path is at the very least suboptimal.
If you consider leveling a minor inconvenience on your way to playing the game, then I agree with your assessment based on your view. If you, like me, consider leveling an integral and important part of the game, you will probably ask yourself, as I did, why leveling a druid means to not be one for 1/2 of the leveling experience.
I do think leveling is a big part of WoW and an important part. One of the most important parts for some people. I can’t really comment on feral druid since I’ve only leveled a guardian druid this pre patch. For that I think they did a great job at drip feeding their abilities. I think stealth and bleeds are 1 part of the cats toolkit but I don’t see a problem giving that a little later. I’m picturing beginning levels letting the player get a feel for out of stealth combat and rotation. Once that is going decent introduce stealth and openers. Sounds reasonable to me.
Most of these problems have been fixed. I just leveled again during this patch, and you are provided the needed spells for every situation in your quest tracker on the right if you do not have them.
To get to Moonglade before getting Dreamwalking, they give you a hearthstone that takes you there. To use Solar Beam for the artifact quest, you just click it from the quest tracker. To cleanse the magic effects when doing the restoration artifact quest, you do the same.
These are just the three situations I can think of off the top of my head, but I did not encounter a situation once where I couldn’t progress because my level was too low.