"See, the huge downside to BM is if your pet dies, there goes almost half your DPS. Survival, if your pet dies in the middle of a boss fight... who cares? You can still top meters with the pet dead."

Well that maybe why they need to nerf ES, topping the dmg meter with your pet dead should not be possible, hunters need pets to be competetive with any spec, end of story. When your pet dies as MM or SV you lose 500-700dps (raid buffed possibly on a fight that does little to no AoE) and if you still manage to top the dmg meter with your pet dead you either a) run with fairly poor dps or b) need to be nerfed. Yeah I am going to go ahead and choose the latter.

I don't agree with what you said.

Pets shouldn't matter if you use a spec when the pet is a non-critical part of it. If it does, then they Blizzard should be buffing the ghouls Unholy DKs get, or buff the imp affliction locks use most of the time as a mana battery. These 2 specs only get 0%-5% of their dps from their pets. Why should non-BM spec'd hunters be nerfed if other similarly spec'd classes output just as much dps with low dps pets?

One way to "reinforce" the connection between hunter and pet for the MM and SV trees would be to keep the pet as a smaller part of a hunter's overall DPS compared to BM, but make more MM and SV abilities dependent on the pet being alive.

That way SV and MM can still maintain a fairly high personal DPS output, but there would be a good case to be made for managing your pet's survivability more often than not.

As to what current abilities should be tied to a pet's mortality I can't speculate on, but if Blizzard end up reworking hunter damage/talents/pet synergy in a major way anyway, it could be interesting to implement it with new or changed talents & mechanics.