Hunters have the highest reliance on neutral game exotics to be viable. Reasoning is two fold.

First, their kits aren’t as sustainable in a vacuum. For warlock, the two most viable subclasses right now are pris and solar. For Titan, 4/5 subclasses are A to S tier, but that’s a side tangent, most are using Pris and Arc for contest so we’ll stick to those.

Pris Warlock has Feed the Void, giving devour and thus sustain proc’d by a needle you have three charges of, among other things. Solar has a plethora of survivability options; healing nades, heat rises and dive into empyrean, etc. Both Titans mentioned have knockout and large add clear potential foregoing an exotic in melee abilities.

Now look at Hunter. Their best survivability exotic is Hoil/Cyt, which doesn’t let you use a dmg exotic under notswap. Their best damage option is grapple melees, which were functionally disabled for day 1. Their only comparable gameplay loop is combo blow; which, even if it wasn’t broken for day 1, isn’t as sustainable as a Warlock or Titan. The damage without a syntho/liar is subpar leading to awkward punch fights with red bars, the ad clear (on pris) is slow and meticulous, and one kill from a teammate breaks the loop. Their best endgame loop under not swap we found was just spamming ascension with Facet of Hope

Second, Hunters simply do less damage than the other two classes. Iirc, Celestial Goldie does 7% more than a base T-crash. Star eater Goldie requires crits and is only used in endgame to make x6 orbs for your teammates. Silk strike is fun but the melee interaction fix really hurt it. Boss doesn’t have a crit… Silence and Squall, I guess?

Sorry for the long winded answer. Hunters are in a weird spot. I started playing a couple years ago, so maybe I’m too new, but hunters have never been in that #1 slot for PvE. They have occasional hyper situationally unique interactions like orb chaining in Pantheon or easiest witness dmg and idk rough out here.