No, you're totally alone. No one else is as puzzled as you are, especially not anyone in the thread you're reading.

As far as I can see, the changes do not bring us particularly closer to where "we should be" with regards to rogue dps - what it does is make existing itemization more convenient for us.

The net effect of the changes is that every FAP weapon has about 28.2% more FAP than before. That gain in FAP is of roughly the same scale as the loss in AP from HotW not affecting STR (STR*2.72-2.26), give or take a few dozen AP. With +10% AP applied to the sum of the changes (and thus regaining some of what was lost as well as working on FAP, buffs, agility..), you are going to, again broadly and it differs with gear level, in particular how much rogue gear you were already wearing, going to see something like a total 5-15% increase in AP when raidbuffed.

That may seem like a lot, but as has been demonstrated often enough, the feral druid's real scaling problem is not a lack of AP - it is being very poor at transforming raw AP into damage. Druids are not going to scale a lot better because of this change, merely a little better: those 80-95% of your new AP that was your old AP don't scale one whit better with gear, but at least there'll be more items of interest to us and you will have that bit of extra AP.

Not that you couldn't solve the scaling issue via AP by making high-end gear provide high amounts of AP (though it would be difficult to set up without letting low-end gear, where the current setup works quite well, get unbalanced), it is just that addressing it via a change to our talents/abilities seem more likely.

From a practical perspective, something like the FAP and HotW change are much more in line with sops thrown to the players, since this is what players complained the loudest about (lack on STR on gear, our "2Hs" scaling worse than others' "2Hs"), than really addressing scaling issues. Furthermore, you couldn't really make the HotW change without the FAP change (or another change increasing AP in general) or you would be reducing the AP of a lot of druids in the dungeon-blues, heroics, Karazhan range (where characters are most often not fully raidbuffed): Those changes come as a package deal.

As an example, if Blizzard really wanted the FAP weapons to provide druids with as much benefit, in terms of actual damage output, from their weapon as other dps classes, they would not have merely increased the scaling multiplier by 28.2% to match the white dps scaling on 2H weapons (which fits the words, but not the spirit of damage scaling), but by something in the range of 200%+.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong - I'm quite happy with the changes overall, especially as I had more or less given up on future itemization catering to the primary stats that we druids love and adore, it is just that I do not see them provide much more than that: convenience and a larger selection of items to be considered attractive.

The theory about the aura mod looks pretty good. Basically what they are saying is that your own PC can now keep track of your form, but the aura doesn't change til it's confirmed by the server.

Idol of Terror strikes me as a tanking idol, not a DPS one, as said above.

Everyone seems extremely excited over the Signet of Primal Wrath that the other feral ring seems to be ignored.

Signet of Eternal Life: 54 stam, 37 resil.

For tier6 tanks (people most likely to be completing the timed quest in ZA), this might actually replace our old armour rings. Keep in mind nearly every end game tank will be losing 19 resil and 8 defense from replacing our cloak and bracers with heroic items. If you don't need the armour, this seems to be an extremely attractive option for getting back that uncrittable status without socketing or enchanting for defense.