To answer your question, we may still add back in the ability to exclude specific items. We are plugging away at our feature list as fast as we can, trying to bring the site to our complete vision for it.
I’m not sure I completely follow your reasoning for the rest of your post, or maybe I just disagree with it a little.
If you are using the single target adaptive strategy, why would you think the advice is bad if it tells you the best way to to single target damage? We have a multi-target adaptive strategy based on the mythic+ script as well. If you switch to that one, it favors crit less and mastery more, as you would expect.
The idea that you can “merge” gearing strategies for multiple fight types into one generic overall gearing strategy is an idea that we disagree with. We think that gear should be optimized on a per fight basis, since that is the only way to optimize based on real data. We are going to be updating the addon to support multiple gear sets from multiple gearing strategies, which will then let you quickly swap gear on the fly in raids.
I’d argue that we have a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the data we are working with. This is why we are trying our best to educate our users about the margin of error that is involved. The legendary customization feature is another step in trying to help people see that gear optimization is not a black and white problem with just “one” solution. There is a cloud of near-optimal solutions that we pick one from. Personal preference may push you towards a different one than we would pick by default.
You might want to check out my recent article about the MM hunter rotation:
The optimize picks the gloves for you right now for single target, and not the back. It favors the gloves in all the sims that I try. The back isn’t bad - there are combos where it is very close in value, but generally not quite as good. I understand from a play perspective that the gloves offer great utility as well, which may allow the player to perform an optimal rotation for more of the fight. There is really no way for us to assign a “value” to that though, which is why we added the feature to make it easier to customize the results.
Our “stat-weighting” system is human readable, imo. The problem is that the gear optimization problem has become way more complex in legion with so many special effects on items. Stat weights themselves are of extremely limited use when it comes to optimizing gear now. We have to use simulation data to optimize gear, otherwise we’d basically just be making things up based on anecdotal evidence.
As far as picking stats on gear around the special effects, we have known for quite a while that simple stat priorities were never great at picking gear which matches the simulation data that created the stat weights. Stat weights are a linear predictive model. People have used stat caps to try to shoehorn stat weights into the simulation data a bit better, but, they fall far short of the mark. In reality, there are combinations of stats all over the place that can be optimal. This is hard to show/explain to the user compared to simple stat priorities, but we’re giving it a shot because we don’t want to just tell everyone that they HAVE to stack a particular stat when there are other stat combinations that would also be good.
In the case of the export string you provided, your gear already has a lot more mastery than crit. The main loss of mastery is from putting on lower item level tier items. The main gain of crit is from replacing the poor haste/vers ring with a high crit ring. Those are both reasonable optimizations for a MM hunter, imo. The 2T20 is very strong.