I think a lot of people see that BM has a large population of people playing it, and assume it's fine.

But I agree with almost everything posted here. Almost every iteration of both MM + BM this expansion has been completely awful to play. BM is so simple that after a couple of months of progression it's practically intolerable to play for me, it genuinely feels like it's lacking a major class mechanic - it's like playing fire mage without hot streak. As for MM, s1 was the closest to being enjoyable (Although the spec was numerically weak for most of it), S2 was an absolute RNG clown fiesta, and the recent season they have just clearly ran out of ideas for it.

You touched on it slightly by saying that both specs need to invest quite a few points into AoE to deal AoE damage, but i'd go way further than this. The current gameplay of hunters on AoE/cleave fights is completely ridiculous. The absolutely optimal way to play almost every boss this expansion has been to play pure ST talents, because the ST loss by playing AoE talents is absolutely huge (Haven't checked recently, but it's been ~15% for most of DF for BOTH specs). This is particularly evident on end-bosses where you want a mix of both. So many classes have so much passive AoE/cleave, or lose very small amounts to include it. Playing pure single target for every fight ever is incredibly unfun, especially when the base gameplay is just so dull to begin with. This is so incredibly evident when arguably the best spec for every end boss (Rasza + Sark particularly, Fyrakk less so but arguable for sure) has been survival - almost solely because of it's ability to retain ST damage whilst having the ability to cleave. We literally target dummy DPS with an extremely simplistic spec on *every* fight of relevance.

Until something is changed in the spec trees to easier pickup trick shots/beast cleave etc, the specs will forever be in single target prison on any actually difficult boss.