You’re basically describing the modern Hunter to me as well; good in loosely-balanced, open-world scenarios where you can open on the target but bad in tightly-competitive arena match scenarios (unless, of course, its CC or damage happens to be exceptional in that particular patch cycle like SV in 8.x or BM right now). There’s not much the BC Hunter had that the modern Hunter would be envious of while there’s a hell of a lot the modern Hunter has that the TBC Hunter would be envious of (e.g. Disengage, Hi-Explosive Trap).
You’re also glossing over glaring weaknesses of the BC Hunter. For example, you could be caught while out of mana and effectively useless. You could also be kept firmly in melee range while the melee class effectively counters your kiting ability (e.g. immunities, root breaks, CC). The enemy could outheal your damage (especially given TBC Hunter’s lack of an interrupt). The enemy could rot the Hunter down with debuffs that the Hunter can’t do anything about due to their weak mitigation and non-existent self-healing.
I do agree that the old Aspect was nice but I don’t think it was OP nor do I think Blizzard considered their change to be a nerf. AotC was often not applicable in combat situations because even being hit once would immediately negate any benefit gained from applying it. It was also a pretty major damage penalty (due to not using AotH) especially later on i.e. end of MoP. Later on they made it so you could glyph it to just remove itself and put a cooldown on aspects instead of dazing you but it still had niche utility. I used it a lot through WoD (because AotH was pruned by then so it wasn’t a damage penalty) and it was only consistently helpful on a small handful of fights due to the proliferation of targeted splash damage from bosses.
This is playing up our CC ability to hell and back. Freezing trap required positioning and pulling and its duration was shorter than its CD. You could set it up so you could trap 2 (or even 3) targets at once but this had exceedingly niche usefulness and was mostly just showing off. Meanwhile, Polymorph was a simple target-and-cast that could be kept up indefinitely.
Using the Hunter as a CC bot is a hilariously bad usage of the group’s resources. Hunters in BC were among the top single target DPSers in the game, for one. The amount of effort saved by a mage not having to polymorph is completely minimal. There is no 5 man or raid content that requires Hunters getting more clever with traps than basic pulling-and-trapping and it’s rarely useful even if you did do it.
Sure (except for Wing Clip which would be mostly useless due to the modern design of Concussive Shot) but BC Hunter also lacked mobile auto shot/steady shot, Disengage leap, Hi-Explosive Trap, Bursting Shot, Binding Shot, Exhilaration, etc etc.