Has its use ability been modeled yet? It has gobs of +hit, and the use looks like it could be valuable in conjunction with other -armor items. With armor penetration stats being added onto gear, my interest is certainly piqued.

The thing is, there's no real "magic number" for hit - it's all about tradeoffs. More hit is going to continue to increase your damage until you reach the aforementioned hit cap. AP and Crit also increase your damage. More of any damage stat is going to boost your DPS - hence, what it comes down to is how much hit we're talking versus how much AP or crit. If it's a choice between getting an extra 5 hit rating or an extra 50 AP, the 50 AP is going to be better. If it's a choice between getting an extra 5 hit rating or 1 AP, the hit rating is going to be better.

Thus, the correct mindset is not "I need to have at least X% hit, and then I'll stack AP and crit" - instead, the question to be asking is "given my current gear, how much is hit rating 'worth', in terms of damage output, relative to AP and crit?" Once you know that conversion factor, you can assess which piece of gear is going to give you the most benefit.

Now, admittedly, deriving that conversion is somewhat tricky; this is why so much time and effort goes into developing good spreadsheets to model the situation. I know the rogue spreadsheet has a section where it specifically computes the relative value of each stat; it would not surprise me to find out that the other class spreadsheets do as well.

Is a bear a 2h? and is a cat a 1h, 2h, or duel? anyone know?

Pre-bc, deathwing's spreadsheet could cut through all the "opinions" and get you to the answer about relative value pretty quickly. That's not the case anymore, so there seems to be lots of guessing. Hopefully the new spreadsheets will be in a place to give some conclusive answers shortly, particularly becuase before gems, which item was "best" was usually pretty obvious.

It would seem that hit has a certain relative value up to 8%, and a very different value post 8%. The logic is this - hit helps white dmg/rage and specials up to 8%, and after that, it helps white dmg/rage only. Assuming a 50%-ish split, doesn't the value of hit get halved from 9% onwards? Logic flaw?

depends on factors such as procs.

I know you're not a rogue, but hit means more than just "additional white damage" because +hit beyond the 8% level helps with poisons, combat potency, and mongoose if they have it offhand.

Possibly for warriors. For combat rogues it's hard *not* to get to the yellow attack miss number, which is why I didn't mention that. In particular, for rogues, you absolutely want to get that number (but you almost always will)... but after that, hit remains very very good all the way to the hit cap. Hence, that's something to keep in mind in terms of "how much hit% is not enough" although not so relevant to "how much hit% is too much"

Also, I'd note, missing a yellow attack doesn't always cost you the full amount of damage, since the energy/rage cost of a miss is (in most cases) lower than if the attack is successful, so the damage differential might not be quite as large as you'd expect.

I'm skeptical about going towards the hit% cap.

Now I know the spreadsheet isn't 100% accurate, I did some comparisons of my gear vs hit capped selection of gear and it shows a very small dps difference. Perhaps the Netherblade 2pc skews things a lot.

I'm currently 4/5 Netherblade and I've found a liking to the 2pc and 4pc set bonuses: I feel like I'm getting a lot more damage out of everything but I haven't ran any sort of testing with Recap or whatever so I won't say too much. All the extra hit rating past 6% is just a boost to your white damage and no significance to yellow damage. So perhaps my ratio of yellow:white damage is a lot higher like 60%/40% while people with more hit rating will see more skewed results of 40%/60%.

Basically there are 2 types of melee in terms of hit: single weapon and dual weapon. Only warriors, rogues, hunters and shaman can even get dual weapons. So druid is single weapon, always.

The difference between 1h and 2h is in normalized instant attack multipliers, which cats and bears don't have.