No... that's not what a "rotation" is. The term refers to a sequence of offensive abilities.
Fair enough; I always thought that "rotation" included any abilities, both offensive and defensive, but your terminology works too. That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically -- and while you're casting FD, you're not casting Steady Shot. This is all that I meant. That said, I was unaware that FD was off the GCD; I don't remember if it was always like that or if they changed it at some point.
I think you're being somewhat pedantic, and missing my point.
Your original post made it sound as though you only cared about the final DPS readout, to the exclusion of anything else, such as aggro management. When I still played WoW, there were plenty of players who thought exactly that way; you couldn't throw a snowball without hitting one. These people were the leading cause of death in dungeons. I understand that you are not one of them, but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
That said, in the more general sense the DPS aggro monkeys were victims of over-fitting; and my point was that declaring actions "worse than useless" is often -- though obviously not always -- a symptom of over-fitting, or perhaps merely of solving different goals. For example, the fencer who ends every move with a flourish might have a very different goal in mind ("showing off", "roleplaying", "added challenge", etc.) than a purely competitive player whose only goal is "winning the match as quickly as possible".
From the point of view of the competitive player, his opponent is indeed performing "worse than worthless" actions; yet the assessment is still incorrect.
From your description of events in WoW, I understand that the above probably does not apply to those Hunters whom you'd described; however, I still maintain that it is often the case.
That said, if you have an ability that builds up aggro faster than the tank can compensate for it, then you will end up either casting FD periodically -- and while you're casting FD, you're not casting Steady Shot.
This is true, and in fact I have an amusing anecdote about this very fact (amusing in retrospect, of course).
I understand that you are not one of them [people who only care about DPS and not threat], but I think I can be forgiven for misinterpreting your original post, given the prior.
Granted. The prior is pretty strong there, true enough....
There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.
One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.
However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]
During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.
This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.
In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.
[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees: