Not… even remotely.
Daggers are useful to myriad casters and rogues. Maces are useful to some casters and 1h melee types. Staves are useful for all casters and generally preferred to options which demand you get an offhand.
The only comparable weapon type is the Warglaive which, like ranged weapons, is exclusively useful to two specs. Everything else is more useful than ranged weapons.
I don’t support appeals to popularity but GL on your quest.
even though they can use/equip these weapons, they don’t, staves or maces are the best for these classes in shadowlands. only rogues are using daggers atm and this is reinforced by the daggers in SL being chiefly agility, rather than there being intellect daggers too, which only goes to show that blizzard wants casters to chiefly use staves or mace+offhand combos as these are more widely available to casters from every source.
My hunter can still equip and hold a sword, stave, etc, does this mean swords and staves count for me, especially for the fact that historically weapons of these types specifically dropped for hunters too?
Just because a class can still equip/use a dagger and that they dropped specifically for them in past expansions, doesn’t mean it still counts today when the game isn’t specifically feeding them daggers in the current xpac and instead making them focus on staves/maces. Legion should have made this perfectly clear too when the artifact weapon types forced on casters.
There are many more options for other weapon types because there are many more classes that can use those weapon types. More bang for the buck.
I hear you, you want more. I would love to have the ability to train any creature I see in the world, and have two of them run around with me wherever I go, that sounds fun. But hey, I can’t, because I’m not a Hunter.
Perks and downsides.
Bows are just boring and nobody wants to waste time designing them.
Used to be.
Druid and Paladins surpassed them years ago.
Well there’s a gun but it’s died to necrolord. Reguardless I agree. As a player who recently decided I want to make this scrub toon my main I’d love more gun options
Its probably already been said but no other class uses/equips those weapons whereas the other types are widely used by everything else
Was nice when warriors and rogues could also equip bows and guns but that got removed, and one of hunter’s spec actually uses a two hander melee. So it’s kinda justified that there only be so many new models for something only 2 specs out of 30+ can use 
at least the bow looks really neat
warcraft logs and graphs showing class representation based on em says otherwise:
Hunters have are always among the highest representation, if not the top, in pve content over the patches since WoD.
meanwhile druid’s always been middle of the road and paly apart of the bottom half.
only shows raiders
Crossbows aren’t ugly.
What Bliz’s art team does with crossbows is ugly.
can also run your own little experiement… list a fake group in group finder, doesnt matter if a raid listing, m+ listing, or pvp group… notice the amount of each class that queue up over a 5 minute period and notice that more hunters queue up than any other… because there are a hell of alot more of them than anyone else 
Dont feel like doing people work for them…so this is the very first pop on google
_https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/global-stats/classes
Its been like this for years…
As OP as Paladins and Druids have been allowed to remain in this expansion, you can rest assured those class populations are even higher than what is shown there (which they are already the top 2)
issue with that website is there’s no dataset, no numbers, etc
or simply, where do they pull these % from.
Plus there’s also the fact that this website is dead, the last update was 2019. https://i.imgur.com/DTogAKl.png
-edit-
actually it looks like too that they only take data from players who have at least a 1800+ rating in pvp and at least 1 bosses killed in mythic raid.
So in otherwords, the majority of the playerbase is ignored.
So go google some stats for yourself? This is common knowledge to anyone whos remotely payed attention.
Maldraxxus Covenant says hi.
googling wont prove anything. trying to rely on obsoleted websites isn’t going to show anything. the only remaining sources to get any insight into class population are website such as warcraft logs, raider.io, and arenamate or such
Blizzard has broken and disabled the API and banned addons that attempt to take a population census a couple years ago… so this leaves resources such as pvp and pve leaderboards and logs as the only workaround or method to get a decent sample size of the overall playerbase, and in all 3 of these types of content, hunters represent the highest population or most activity.
This was true until Ranged Survival was deleted. Hunters aren’t the most played or represented now, haven’t been since the changes. Which makes me sad.
Though I do agree, more Bow and Gun options would be nice. Crossbows are generally ugly or have borked animations so I could care less about them.
Truth be told though, I usually use the Crypt Fiend Slayer from Halls of Reflection in WotLK(if I recall). Is such a pretty bow, need more things like that imo.
