It's a tradeoff between convenience/ease and raw dps. There's three factors that make hit & expertise not required for optimum dps:

1. White hits & associated fury swipes only make up ~1/4 of our damage
2. Energy abilities that miss or are dodges do not use up their entire cost
3. We are not GCD capped; that is we have downtime between abilities while we wait for energy to build up

The third factor is what really makes hit & expertise not required. Even if you miss, because you have not expended the entire energy, and because you have free GCDs anyways, you can simply re-use the ability until you hit.

The big caveat is that, as you were made painfully aware, you really need to be able to keep on top of your buff/debuffs and be able to make quick decisions on what ability to use next. If you are able to react quickly and correctly to your misses, then you lose little dps even with 0 hit and 0 expertise, and because those stats have been converted to other dps stats (hopefully mastery) overall you gain DPS. However, if you find yourself unable to keep tabs on what's missed and what's hit and your bleed uptimes suffers, then you will find hit & exp more useful.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that your theoretical max dps will suffer if you have hit and expertise, but if you can't pull off the mechanics in reality then theory doesn't help that much.

As Mew will easily tell you, Primal Madness does give a DPS increase. It's just not very significant amount of DPS increase.
If you want to absolutely maximize your DPS, you should take it, because you will still have talent points leftover.
If you are going for a hybrid bear +cat build, then yes, Primal Madness will be the first talent to drop.

Primal madness gives a damage increase if it falls off (or you cancel it) below 20 energy.

Edit: it increases both current and maximum energy by 20 when it's applied and decreases both by 20 when it falls off.

I see. So it could throw a huge wrench into your rotation if, say, you had 30 energy and were building for a shred, and TF fell off, forcing you to wait and rebuild that energy. Ideally you'd want to lose the buff as close to 0 energy as possible.

I guess using it would require a higher level of timer discipline, so you could cancel the buff when appropriate. I suppose you could also write a mod that compares your current energy, your energy regeneration rate, and the remaining duration on Tiger's Fury and tells you if and when you need to cancel the buff.

But now the question becomes, at what duration and energy state does the loss of TF's damage increase from early cancellation exceed that incurred from having TF fall off?

Things that increase bleed damage also increase your shred damage. Keep that in mind as well.

This is incorrect; Mastery does not increase shred damage.

TF is worth about 2% more DPS; SR is a bit less than that. They're both close. Keep in mind that the TF glyph not only gives you 60/80 more energy in a 5 minute fight, it also gives you 15% more damage more often in that fight.

Has the math been done on Mastery effecting Shred? Cause if not the tooltips on shred and feral cat mastery suggest it.

Also in 5 minutes you get 1 extra Tiger's Fury, which I admit is nice. But that's 15% damage for 6 seconds rather than 5% extra auto-attack damage for 5 minutes. In 5 minutes as well that's suggesting you use it whenever it is up, rather than when your low on energy or using it with berserk/to increase bleed damage. So if you arent using it within 3 seconds of TF coming off cd then it's a wasted glyph.

Also you have to aknowledge the SR glyphs damage will increase with the more haste you have. I personally feel that TF is more of a PvP glyph.

Yeah, this still doesn't change the fact though that you have to be hitting TF within 3 seconds of it coming off CD to make the glyph viable. Even then if you are doing that you aren't always saving it to increase your dot damage or retrieve lost energy. Which in my opinion is what TF should be used for. Where as you will still have well over a couple hundred white hits.

Also minimizing your hit/exp is theoretical. I still find not to be capped but to have it is very useful. For instance hitting a rip and missing, then hitting the rip again and parrying (which will happen at the minimum), then finally applying. By this point you've lost somewhat the energy as well as spammed the same button through 3 gcds. Where with a certain (not capped) amount of exp/hit would have made it able to use 1 rip and 1 shred then start building energy towards other abilities we may need to use. This especially can be important when you need a unexpected cower, or have SR, Rip, and Rake all falling off close together.

Though I think having minimum expertise/hit will lower the damage cause by SR I still think it's better. Also if you decrease your hit/exp and gain a lot of haste instead, you will still be doing more auto-attacks.

Yes, the variance can be higher when you don't maximize hit/expertise, but for every streak that goes like you describe there are other situations where the extra crit/mastery that you have instead of hit/expertise increases your overall damage. In specific situations you can always find places where hit/expertise are superior. But that doesn't change the fact that because bleeds can be reapplied without loss of time on the dots, can be overwritten and most of the damage does not rely on hit/expertise, and that bleeds are about 60% of a feral's overall damage, hit just isn't that necessary. The same was true of afffliction locks back in the day.

I said in my last post the I don't believe hit/exp cap is necessary, however I personally don't think being at the min is dependable for dps. My druid isn't hit/exp cap, but I definitely make sure to have some.

I'm sitting at ~2.5% hit and 4 expertise and haven't missed a skull bash (cat) since Cataclysm hit. I would say that it's incredibly safe to assume that while Maim can be missed/dodged/parried, Skull Bash ignores hit cap.

-edited to mention cat.