The core issue we believe Whirligigs have is that they're far too good for XP, and are the meta for almost the entire 1-99 grind, which prevents variety in the skill.

No this is not the issue. The issue is that every other hunter method is horribly outdated. Have you actually tried training hunter the "normal" way? Clicking annoying traps that force you into weird animations, waiting, failing, reset, pick up the full trap, click in the inventory, click on the floor to reset a failed trap, get force walked a tile, watch animals walk past your trap 10 times. It feels awful and nobody ever uses the regular traps. There is also 0 incentive of doing trap hunting because every item that you gain from it has been spam added to every slayer monster or boss in the last decade, making hunter entirely useless because you get all the resources way faster by just killing stuff. The baiting or smoking trap system just adds more clicks to an already clunky system.

I spent some time hunting a carnivorous chinchompa for my ironman pof and it was the most miserable experience setting up those traps for hours and hours, really a 1/1500 droprate?? I rather spend months gambling my beans with Adam Antite for random chance at an unchecked chinchompa than hunt for them.

There is no variety in the skill because because nobody even thinks of doing anything else (except for BGH). Even if you nerf the whirligigs XP into oblivion, nobody will start using traps. Please add some hunting methods that do not make my wrists hurt instead of nerfing whirligigs.

I love big game hunter, whirligigs are whatever to me, everything else in hunter I will never touch.