Tbh that questline was about you being able to use a lot of abilities except the pet, so? The approach they made was to 1. make it a solo quest 2. make it difficult (hell we all tried and failed the first time) 3. make it fun (which it was). Also i remember not using my pet that much anyways, back when we where raiding bwl and mc, doing surv spec mostly without the pet, as where loads of hunters on my server. The big bm burst came since 2.0 or 2.1 ish?