I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing - that's exactly what I'm saying. Itemisation is the root cause of this entire problem, not procs or anything else. "Fix" itemisation so that feral druids have a perfect DPS set, and I really doubt there would be any problems.

Emphasis mine

There is no immutable law that says Blizzard can't just add a 45% SnD or a +30% Damage finisher to our class. We don't automatically need Procs in order to scale well, we need something equivalent.

But isn't this at the core a perception problem?
One sees 1% wipes and the first realiziation would be: If we just had some little more DPS and everything went the same, he would be dead by now.

I question this kind of thought, because ... and Leotheras is a very good ecample for that ... Battle Rezzing a mage/rogue/... who got WWed (and this will happen in the tries to get the first kill on him) gives the raid in effect quite a lot of DPS.
The same stays true for Vashj where a stupid death in phase1 (come on, you cant tell me that you didn't have guildmates doing stupid things the first tries) will finish all your hope you could have had to keep control of phase2.

Yes, having subbed out a druid could give you more DPS ... but so is a perfectly placed BR.

We had our feral on our Vashj First Kill, Kael first kill, and every first kill since then except Bloodboil (which ironically really caters to the OT skills of a feral). Because our raid is supid sometimes, errors will happen and BR is an option to get back on track.
Not to mention that in some ecnounters deaths are not avoidable.

I'm not sure I can agree with you here. From my understanding, the reason why SnD/flurry and other haste effects are so effective in helping class scaling is (at least in part) due to the proc rate (including WF) being increased to such a massive degree from the increased attack speed.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't help because it truly would, but I think in the long run we would still be behind on the curve. Blizzard can only buff druids so much before they become overpowered in a single player scenario-Procs (mainly WF here) are important IMHO because it puts that extra damage boost in the hands of someone else for WF or from sacrificing item points on weapon procs for other items.

Druids can already win every duel against any other class. But I am not sure why any "single player scenario" is relevant to the potential DPS output of raiders. I am fairly certain duels don't get you epics or arena points.

My point was that these classes rely on each other for buffs in order to provide as much damage as they do. Blizzard wont buff us so that we can do that amount of damage (edit: even 80% of their raiding damage for example) without relying on those buffs from other classes (my main point here is WF). Single player scenarios are irrelevant to raiding, but raiding is only a part of WoW, and there is no way IMO that Blizzard can afford to have us scale as well out of raids as other classes can only do in dps centric groups.

Instead of linking a significant source of scaling to limited (mainly raiding) situations, it would be available under any condition.

exactly my point. thats why WF would not be overpowered. because we only get it with a shaman in group. give us an equivalent self ability and it can be a problem. although a new finisher would be nice XD

You can see it for yourself, in WWS. It's not that our Yellow damage is crazy, or our white damage is super low. It is exactly that we do not have that finisher that is bringing our damage up to par with rogues, shreds/mangles account for almost the same amount, -5-10% as a rogues sinister strikes and the rare eviscerates. Just you look at the other end, we are spending our combo points mostly on rips(sometimes nothing at all) which account for 20% of our damage, instead of a near 50% speed increase on our white damage, which combined with WF and the occasional proc(trinket/weapon/set) and the use of haste pots are basically what is leaving our white damage so low while sky rocketing rogues to the ~70/~30 split they are seeing with white to yellow.

Windfury and a speed increase/damage increase finisher would see us reach these proper levels, hell they could even add in a mechanic that increases our white damage while bleeds or just rip is up that would probably see our damage reach closer to where it should be. The problem is that they aren't looking at this, no one is looking at what druids are putting our right now in tier 6 and we are gonna get shat on for it in the next set of raid instances. At least until the next expansion where we get to be a balanced class for 10 levels.

Don't count on that, our base paw damage will sit at 55 dps, the same as it was at 60.

I'm not justifying the gap.
I'm just saying (in response to a "i had to sit out a first kill, else we would not have the DPS" posting) that raid invites depend on a lot of things, and personal DPS should play a minor role in that. Because in the end the only thing that matters is raid dps. And you dismissing "guildmate screwups" as a non argument is contradictory to your whole point.
If no screwups would happen there is no encounter in game (up to RoS ... Shahrazz, Council and Illidan I have no experience with) where DPS (an subbing out a feral for a rogue) is an issue. YMMV.

The simple point for the argument for windfury is this.

With Windfury a feral is perfectly viable in a melee dps group, appropriately buffing other melee, standing with the other melee and getting all the same buffs as the other melee.

Without Windfury as it is now, we are wasting that buff from which a second warrior or a third rogue is MUCH more appropriate in that group slot, we will never be a viable DPS without a proper group setup for us, which almost always runs Windfury and not GoA. (Twisting totems makes me giddy though)