I am inclined to think this may not have been intended as the tooltips would suggest. It also explains hunters horrible scaling in later tiers. I am aware this wasn’t fixed until TBC but as with some other unintended bugs that did exist in classic blizzard has decided to change I guess it’s up to blizzards discretion to fix it or not.

It is quite a confusing thing to have a stat name mean 2 things without specifying which it applies to, leaving people to search 3rd party info to know or trial and error. It clearly wasn’t as the original creators intended. Therefore it is a bug, whether or not it’s a bug they want to stick to is the question. I imagine they may be concerned about the #nochanges backlash if they do. I for one hope they choose to as it would make the class more viable in the raiding scene and promote raids to have more then then warriors / rogue / mage stacking.