I said it would never happen... But.

It's a (semi) well-know fact that I've always been more than slightly against the Survival Spec as a PvE build.

True, in the past, it's been the top raid spec. And also true is the fact that it's become more and more viable as patches have tweaked the hunter role.

After the 3.1 patch, I respecced to MM for a while, in the hope that I could squeeze out a little more pure DPS, but that was a false-hope. All I did was nerf my own pet, and while my own DPS did increase, it wasn't enough to compensate.

Maybe if Trueshot aura was higher in the MM tree it would be more worthwhile investing more points into it. But, for now at least, it's only the top of that tree that I'd consider worthwhile.

But survival now looks like a very promising spec. The "Black Arrow" and "Explosive Shot" look very good, and the potential for DPS from those 2 alone looks like it could be a winner.
It'd mean giving up most of my Macros until I got into the swing of how it all works, but I'm sure I could redesign them later.

I don't have any of the exotic pets anyway, so I'm not going to miss any of those. But it'll feel weird not seeing a giant red Cat ripping the face off anything in front of it.
it wasn't so long ago that I did a little test, just for fun.
I asked Bolle a (full T7.5) Holy Paladin to just stand there and heal himself why my cat attacked him. (I didn't attack). In it's regular attacks he could easily heal himself up forever, but as soon as I popped that big-red-beast button he got his ass handed to him within seconds. He actually spanked my Cat to death rather than just trying to heal out of its DPS. but it proved a point.

So, do I want to lose that feeling of god-like power? Even if it means that I can nuke the crap (even more) out of anything in my path?

Yes.

I'll miss it, but if I really get that sad about it I'll act stupid and pay 1000g for dual specs so I can do it again.